I see a lot of people doing bicep curls in the gym to tone their arms, but it really baffles me. If you look at your biceps right now, you’ll notice that it’s not that big of a muscle. I know what you’re thinking, it’s not big right now, but if I do a lot of bicep curls, it will tone up. Well, sadly you’ll be wrong again to think that.
Before I talk about what is the most effective exercise for biceps, I need to tell you how to tone your muscles. Creating fantastic muscle tone and definition comes down to one factor, FAT! You can do 1000 bicep curls and have amazing biceps, but if it’s covered in a layer of thick fat, no one will know. To achieve excellent muscle tone and definition, you should lose at least 10% body fat for a man and 12% body fat for a girl. One thing I should mention here as well is that you CANNOT reduce fat. What I mean by fat reduction is that if you do bicep curls you’re not just burning fat in your arms, you’re taking it from all over your body. Unfortunately, the areas of greatest fat storage are the lower abdomen for men and the hips and thighs for women, so these areas are the last to go.
Okay, I’ve been unfair to trusty bicep curls, as people in gyms haven’t been doing them for years and getting better. In fact, they have, but these people are bodybuilders and are looking to increase the size of their biceps as much as possible. As for fat loss and muscle toning, it is not an effective exercise for it. When you’re looking to lose fat, you want to burn as many calories as you can in your workout. Also a balanced fat loss and muscle toning program should of course include the use of the biceps. I recommend using a good old fashioned chin. The chin up is known as a compound exercise, which means it uses more than one joint, the shoulder and the elbow, unlike the bicep curl, which is just the elbow. With your chin up, you’ll be using more than just your biceps and therefore burning more calories and losing more fat.
“But I can’t lift my chin!!!”
I hear you say Well, you don’t have to do full pull-ups. First of all, you can always use an assist machine, setting it to 2/3 your weight if you haven’t done a pull-up in a long time. If you don’t have an assist machine, you can always do eccentric pull-ups. This means jumping or going up to the top of your chin and down.
Bottom line, if you’re a bodybuilder, you’ll want to increase the size of your biceps with curls, but if you’re just looking to tone your arms, you’ll want to do pullups. These use more muscle and therefore burn more fat and will tone your arms faster than any form of bicep curl.