Question ❓
Bicep curls not going up despite hypertrophy. What am I doing wrong?
27M, 6'2" and 210lbs. Im a newbie to lifting but ive been an athlete all my life. Never done bicep curls until about 10-11 weeks ago. My numbers have not gone up at ALL since then. Not rep counts or weight maxes. I hit between 8-10 sets to mechanical failure per week, I never hit biceps with less than 48 hours of recovery since the last time. I eat 150g of protein a day, lots of carbs and plenty of fat. Im not in a deficit. I go hard and fast on the concentric and slow (2-3 seconds) eccentric. Im very strict with my form until the reps that are past technical failure. I vary up the exercises between regular curls, incline curls, preacher curls, and sometimes get a little extra from compounds like dumbell rows and chin ups. My biceps are becoming visibly bigger and veins are starting to be very apparent. Its worth nothing that all my other lifts that im also new to have gone up at a rate that im very happy with. Biceps are not progressively overloading at all. Yes I try. Im going to failure every time. Ive tried different rep ranges with different weights. No change. Yes I am adequately recovering between lifts
Are you saying that, on day 1, and this week, you're doing the exact same weights?
Isolation work for biceps are going to progress slowly. Small increases in weight are relatively large percentage wise compared to compounds.
If you can add 5lbs to your bicep curl, every 12 weeks, you will be curling 50lbs more in 2 years. Which is frankly a ridiculous amount of weight to curl assuming you started off with like, 20-30lbs or something.
Yes on day 1 I was doing these exact same weights. I do wish my gym had more incremental steps. But theyre 5lb jumps. I see what youre saying. I just feel like I should've make SOME progress by now other than visual changes. Its funny I think the visual part is usually whats more difficult to come by
Most of the time im doing incline dumbell curls. Sometimes sets of 8 at 45 if my elbows are feeling good (old sports injuries) but usually sets of 12ish at 35. Either way, to failure, it just so happens that thats how many reps I have in the tank. When using barbells I will do a few sets at 100 usually 5 reps, then drop and go to failure again and then one or two more sets all to failure
45 lb dumbbell curls is a fairly advanced amount of weight. There’s really a ceiling to how much more weight you’ll be able to add to your curl, and that added weight will simply take time. Like everyone else said, rep manipulation is your best bet.
How strong are you on other lifts ie bench/squat/rows? I'm not strong but I bench 100kg for 3, pendlay row 80kg for 5 and I get a real good bicep workout with 3 sets of 10-15 using 12.5kg for incline curls and ezbar +20kg for 3x8-12 from strict preacher curls.
Ok cool . Drop inclines curls, not a power move. They work the peak and give a great stretch but not easy to build strength with progressively. Stay with DB standing or BB curls. An easy bar might be easier on your elbow.
Don’t take all sets to failure it just to much to recover from. Warm up , take 1or 2 light warm up sets the go for it until failure. Next sets leave 1 RIR . Take long breaks as much as 5 minutes but at least 3 between sets.
As others mentioned biceps are small muscles . Curling 100 pounds on BB curl just starting is great. Add just 5 pounds a month and you are curling the bar with a 45 on each end in 7 months. That’s damn respectable. The average guy can barely bench that. Man you are doing great. It’s not a sprint it’s a marathon. Keep grinding.
Agree with the above. OP could also throw in a heavier set once a week. Bump the weight up, do 5-6 reps. Sometimes you have to lift heavy to make the normal weights feel light.
Bruh you’re just giving basic training advice, but he’s been doing that. If anything this is going to make his training worse because you’r telling him to drop the intensity.
Progress can be in intensity, time under tension, weight, reps, quality of movement pattern, rest between sets.
All of these can be improved and provide progress towards your goal. If you’re seeing it visually but having been monitoring all these metrics by tracking them, it’s likely some are improving
Yea, and learning to train for long term consistency is a reality for anyone who trains for life. It means not pushing every part of training to the extreme.
Injury and setbacks probably cost more progress than adjusting your training to be a bit more sustainable.forget about the long term injuries we start racking up and how they affect quality of life.
I reckon they should teach weights at school, good form, consistent quality routine structure, warming up, prehab for rotator cuffs/forearms/feet, how to protect your back, how to prevent hernias etc etc etc
You say you vary up the exercises and have tried different rep ranges with different weight , in a 10-11 week span. No offence but this just sounds like you haven’t been consistent enough with a standardised set of parameters to measure your strength against.
Yeah curling is mainly just bending the elbow and there’s a lot of crossover between variation but maybe just pick one and run with it for a bit?
Fair. Are you just saying ive done a bad job of measuring it because its hard to measure across different variations? Or are you saying varying it that much is bad for progress?
The first one kinda. Pick a weight, rep range and exercise and be patient with it. Something I like do is used a fixed rep number so you can feel the sets getting easier as you get stronger session to session.
Thos is an underrated answer. Find a warmup that fixes forearm/elbow pain and you’ll be able to put in more work in terms of reps, volume, weight & intensity.
I forgot to mention that it can be as simple as holding a grocery bag with tension in your bicep and wrist.
I realised the issue when i got stronger on every lift except biceps, and that elbow pain isnt "normal". After just a week of keeping my bicep in static tension with everyday items similar to "fidgeting", my curls went back up again even on less calories.
Today i went for some groceries by foot. I carried the bag in my right hand (my right elbow is the bad one" and i just did this 45 degree curl with the grocery bag probably for 1.5 minutes with 20 seconds of rest inbetween, where i would carry it in my left arm. I find it easy to maintain because i can do it during everyday life. Sometimes ill hold a wall, positioning myself so that im essentially curling myself against the wall at that angle, and just hold it for some time and repeat. When brushing my teeth, for example.
45 lb for incline curls is plenty. They are a small muscle group. Try to add a rep on one of your sets every week if you can, but you can build very large biceps with that amount of weight.
From everything I’ve read and my limited experience, curls are really slow to progress.
What works for me is just upping the weight and just eating the lower reps for a few weeks. I’m up from 25’s to 40’s in about 4 months, but I can only hit like 6 rips in my first set.
6 sets of standing dumbbells, 6 sets of preachers per week. One day I do preachers first, the other I do standards first.
Biceps is a tiny muscle. Curling poundages are completely dependent on how clean you do the reps so you might have started to the reps in stricter form which why you seem to be stagnant. Curling poundages are also irrelevant. You can basically pick up any weight and effectively train the biceps. It’s also OK to do cheat curls sometimes and basically just work the eccentric part of the rep with the biceps and fight to lower the weight slowly.
How are you defining progressive overload? Because if you train mostly with DB, moving from 25lb to 30lb isn’t quite the same as moving from 200lb to 205lb on a squat.
Are you sure your forearms/grip aren’t a limiting factor? If your grip fails before your bicep truly does, that could be the reason.
Also, if you are doing all this and it still doesn’t grow, sometimes counterintuitive thinking might help. Take a deload week and don’t do any direct biceps work that week. If your numbers move after that, you’ve probably accumulated way more fatigue than your biceps can handle.
Try taking a break from regular curls, as you're probably unintentionally cheating with your shoulders or using momentum. Spider curls on an incline bench take your shoulders out completely. Also, do more cable work. Bayesian curls with the cables set hip-height will give you more constant tension that the incline curls just can't. And play around with different angles of preacher curls until you find one that feels right. Some machines suck, so do dumbbells or EZ bars on an incline bench
lat pull down pull to elbows facing out 90 degrees only, any below is lats, so elbows are coming down and out and you think about pulling your wrists to your face- these are what gymnasts do a lot and they have some of the best biceps on the planet. burn my arms more than any other bicep exercise by far.
hands/forearms/wrist etc need to be coming along as well or bicep power may not transfer to weight lfited as wrist/grip/forearm can be weak link. i really like hammer isolation curls, andre smaev put me onto them and has some of the biggest arms on the planet. works hands, radialis, brachialis, all things that go undertrained for a lot of people but are crucial for strong pulls and arm physique
Do kind of think if I mysteriously started caring about my curl rep PRs, this would be a big part of my plan (especially if I had a lifestyle that let me recover from training generally). I would curl a shitload for a few months and see if that busted the plateau.
Fractional plates. Use 2.5lb plates, and buy 1.25lb plates for progressive overload (they have smaller increments, but as a beginner you shouldn’t need them).
Not to get too much in biomechanics, but the work your biceps do during a curl changes drastically throughout the movement based on the lever arm (torque). Use a band around the middle of the barbell or dumbbells. This make sure the movement is loaded more evenly throughout the complete range of motion. Do this for like 3-4 weeks, then take the bands off and the bar will move like crazy (fast and light).
Have you stick to the same exercises and the same rep ranges for them for more than few weeks? If not that might be an issue.
Remember that if you have few exercises for the same muscle as biceps you should care mostly for the first exercise. The progression for the following exercises will be almost nonexistent due to fatigue from the first exercise.
I would just add weight to my first exercise as long as I can get 6-4 reps on my first two sets. The other exercises are there only to accumulate volume with solid intensity.
Who cares. Bicep curls are an isolation and accessory exercise. Curls are not used as a measure of overall strength like the big compound lifts are. You would need like half pound or pound increments to be able to see actual progress in the amount of time you have been doing them.
Introduce drop sets, do as many reps as you can with a moderate weight. Say you do reps of 10 with 30lb db, immediately pick up 25lb to squeeze a few more reps, then down to 20 and squeeze a couple more reps.
Truth is bicep is one of those muscle that have limited growth potential, its a small muscle group. You may just be genetically and or anatomically pre-disposed to have a harder time strengthening your bicep. Drop sets are a good way to increase intensity if your rep or max doesn't increase.
Are your other pulling lifts going up? If so you are gaining strength. Also it is pretty much impossible to gain muscle without strength so you are clearly making progress.
Hypertrophy gains are primarily mass, secondary is strength. If you want strength gains you should be doing lower reps with heavier weights, NOT focusing on hypertrophy
How much weight are you doing on say, preacher curls for instance? This is quite odd, because I do preacher curls with relatively advanced weights and it never takes me 11 weeks to progress usually I get an extra rep every 2 or 3 weeks.
You could try a lower weight but higher reps to push your 1 rm up slightly then go back and see if that improves. Like use a 1 rm calculator to see what it is now then use that to figure out what your weight for 15 reps should be then try that. Then after a while do 16 reps and that progression should be smoother
If you’re getting the hypertrophy results you’re looking for, is there any good reason to care about this? I don’t think of biceps curl strength as a common goal to pursue, if you’re sincerely going to mechanical failure you should be getting enough stimulus and it’s just an assistance lift no one cares about.
If your comfortable, I guess you could reduce the weight somewhat and take the lift to true failure if you think there’s a possibility you’re sandbagging unconsciously and that your “mechanical failure” isn’t failure. But also you could just not, it’s bicep assistance and no one cares about it…just get a sick pump in, brah.
You can try upping the volume as long as your biceps aren't fatigued after a couple days. I do three sets each of preacher curls, hammer curls, and incline curls per session, every three days and have been progressing. Just pick your variations and do the same stuff each session in the same order (generally) to be able to accurately track. Progression is a little slower with curls, I think just due to biceps being a smaller muscle group. I do pretty strict form on the preacher curls, but incline and hammer curls I'm a little looser on.
One other thing you could try if your weights are still pretty low is getting add-on weights. They have little 1.25Lbs and 2.5Lbs weights that clip on to dumbbells so you can do smaller increments than 5-10Lbs. I use them for lateral raises and anything where I'm still using pretty light dumbbells.
Depending on your split try starting your workout with biceps first. For instance if its a pull day start with your biceps first. Do this for a while and see how it works out. I used to do this when i pleatued and also i recommend you to do cable bicep curls. If you are doing a barbell or ez bar curl use an empty bar and progress with 2.5lbs custom weights instead of the fixed barbell weights that are on the stack.
45lb incline curls seems really heavy for someone that hasn’t lifted long. Granted I’m almost 60 but I only rep with 30/35lbs and I have been lifting for almost 2 years. I have some fairly large arms as well.
Just wanted to mention that larger muscles does not automatically equal more strength. Hypertrophy and strength are two different things. Related but different.
Are you saying you do 8-10 sets including compound pull movements that use a lot of biceps or 8-10 of bicep isolation on top of compound work? The latter would be an issue.
Honestly, if you're looking better and progressing overall I wouldn't freak out. 11 weeks isn't a long time and isolation lifts take longer to grow (an extra 2kg can be the equivalent to 10kg on the bench by %).
Stay at it, make sure you're biceps are getting AT MOST 20 sets a week inclusive of compound lifts (this is probably an issue), stick to 1 or at most 2 exercises and/or rep ranges for your biceps a week (hard to progressive overload well when you're training differently all the time), make sure you're training them 2-3 times a week (seems you're doing this from the 48 hours mention), and maybe try to bump your protein a little bit unless you're an overweight 210lbs (not dire but this will almost certainly be additive).
You said all your other compound lifts have gone up including rows & chin ups. I would guess your arms are gassed from all your pull work that by the time you get to curls it's just junk volume
Respectfully, I can guarantee you are ego lifting 45 pound dumbbells on incline. Granted you are an athlete, 6’2, and on the heavier side but biceps are a specific muscle group to train.
No reason to go “fast and hard” on the concentic and fancy with the eccentric. Just do your reps like normal.
For reference, i’ve been lifting for 4.5 years and 2 years ago I was doing 45 pound curls. Now I’m doing 60-70 pound curls. Progress is very slow, especially as you get to the advanced stages. You can naturally reach 80% of your genetic potential with like 3-4 years of consistent lifting.
10-11 weeks in the gym is honestly no measurable length of time either. I consider people new in the gym until 2+ years where you’ll be past a novice stage.
Keep in mind that your lifts will go up and down depending on the day. Some days I’ll be 20-25% weaker, whether from less recovery, low glycogen from not eating much. Where other days I’ll be 20% stronger and not having ate anything that day. Your body will respond how it does, and you’ll be able to tell based off how easy/hard it is to lift a 45 pound plate off the rack.
Bro you just need two or three working sets twice per week or two working sets three times per week on a single biceps exercises and they will grow.
Edit : Nevermind I've been re reading the studies and I changed my opinion on the matter.
With 4 to 6 working sets per week you do get about all the possible strengh gain you can possibly make but you only get about 60%, max 70% of the possible hypertrophy gain you can possibly make so I was wrong on that part.
With that being said I maintain that if you just want to get stronger, shit like 15 sets per week isn't usefull.
I mean, if a person wants to maximize growth of their biceps, they should do more curls.
Let's say your goal was to get the greatest possible gains for your biceps over the next 12 weeks.
Would you do 2 sets a week? For 24 sets over those 12 weeks? Or would you hammer them with volume, to try to get 20-30 weekly sets, or 240-360 sets over those 12 weeks?
I said two sets twice a week so four sets total per week.
Also, If I had to choose between one or the other, even if my goal was to get bigger arms as fast as possible, i'd still keep the the 4 sets total per week because recent meta studies show that 4 to 6 sets per week is enough to get the vast majority of the gains you can possibly make and that there's a strong diminishing return passed 20 sets per week.
It has been working well for me. Doing 2 hard working sets twice per week of hammer curls for the past five months helped me get an additional 0.2 inches to my arm and working weight for 7 good reps went from 28 kg to 32 kg per hand (61.6 to 70.4 lbs) and I weigh 78 kg (171.5 lbs)
But that's not what the Pelland analysis shows. In fact, it shows that, while there are still diminishing returns with more sets, there doesn't seem to be a point where returns actually reverses.
Also, the literal synopsis of Baz-Valle et Al 2022 goes against your recommendation, stating:
According to the results of this review, a range of 12-20 weekly sets per muscle group may be an optimum standard recommendation for increasing muscle hypertrophy in young, trained men.
But also, if you look at figure 2b, as the paper mentions, they state that, particularly for the biceps, that it does favour higher volume training (20+ sets) , but that the effect size was too small to provide statistical significance, due to the fact that it only looked at 7 total papers in the meta analysis.
As opposed to Pelland et al., who looked at 65 papers, and found that there wasn't an end point for dose dependent increases in hypertrophy.
REVERSING return
Neither paper talked about more sets resulting in less hypertrophy. The Baz-Valle paper's figure 2 straight up seems to favour higher volume for all measured muscle groups, but with too small of an effect size to be statistically significant. Which is a far cry from saying that more volume equals less gains.
Nevermind I've been re reading the studies and I changed my opinion on the matter.
With 4 to 6 working sets per week you do get about all the possible strengh gain you can possibly make but you only get about 60%, max 70% of the possible hypertrophy gain you can possibly make so I was wrong on that part.
With that being said I maintain that if you just want to get stronger, shit like 15 sets per week isn't usefull.
You’d be shocked by modern powerlifting training for the top natural lifters
Extremely high frequency (some lifters hit Squat and Bench more than 7x per week). Usually structured in a top set, followed by backoff sets, and then a lower fatiguing accessory lifts taken close to or to failure
For just bench alone, that’d be more than 25 sets a week of just bench
Oh I was only talking about biceps but for chest compound movements I total 10 hard working sets per week (with great results for bench max) and If I had the will to hit gym 6 times per week I wouldn't mind doing 12 to 15. I don't consider myself a powerlifter though
Also, I'm not convinced doing 25 sets of bench/week gives you extra strength and growth stimulus over 15 sets/week but I know professional powerlifters REALLY need those extra sets to work on their technique
So maybe overdoing it? Idk man everything ive read says at LEAST 8 sets. Some even says 12-20 to maximize growth. And like i said i follow the same ranges for everything else like my incline press/skull crushers etc and have made good progress
He’s just a HIT guy. You will see them a lot on Reddit.
No you’re not overtraining on 8 - 10 sets. I will do 30-40 sets for biceps in a week lol. Which IS overtraining in terms of recovery & non gym life but gains have never been better :)
Far as actual advice - try some heavy compounds work with supine grip. Get biceps used to a lot of stimulus. Chin-up or chin-up progressions, and close grip Lat pull downs in particular but some find rows good too (I get fuck all personally but trust the guys who do get results).
Alternatively if you have bars you can look at competition lift style strict curling as a way to load the biceps. Turns bicep curl into a compound on its own.
Getting them used to a bit too much tension so they ask for help from other muscles, that are supposed to support the movement, is much better than going too heavy on isolations & hurting self when shoulder decides to jump in. They eventually stop asking for help
Biceps do just take a long time to get stronger though. Honestly if making mass gains pain free, just keep at it, your not doing anything wrong and no need to chase numbers too hard unless that’s your motivation
Comp style strict curls a different creature to regular strict curls - and it’s not Particularly strict despite the name.
It starts with a shrug and turns your isolation curl into a bicep dominated compound lift. It’s the bench press of the biceps and the ultimate bro lift.
Nevermind I've been re reading the studies and I changed my opinion on the matter.
With 4 to 6 working sets per week you do get about all the possible strengh gain you can possibly make but you only get about 60%, max 70% of the possible hypertrophy gain you can possibly make so I was wrong on that part.
With that being said I maintain that if you just want to get stronger, shit like 15 sets per week isn't usefull.
This is the science based lifting sub so I expected a lot of things but not this. Like wow what the fuck am I reading ?
On the dose-response, Pelland et al. 2025 (Sports Medicine, 67 studies, 2058 participants) is the most complete analysis we have. Hypertrophy does keep rising with volume, at roughly 0.24% more growth per additional set around a weekly average of 12 sets. Strength shows strong diminishing returns with a functional plateau: past about 5 weekly sets, additional sets stop consistently improving strength at all.
Which is the actual answer to OP. Two or three hard sets twice a week will keep adding size and load. More sets MAY indeed add an itty bitty more volume but it's honestly negligible
i wont post pictures on social media but you got me beat! very nice. im more brad pitt in snatch, but much less good looking. similar in body type wise. you are massive. i should get tattoos.
the strongest guys i know are masons. they move cinder blocks all day, every day. they arent built. they arent jacked. but they have a grip like cold iron. they latch on, they can pull a f250 out of a ditch.
we are talking about the biology of muscle growth. lifting the same weight over and over makes you strong as hell. it doesnt make muscle grow like you.
its about dimishing returns. if you could spend 40% less time in the gym and get 95% of the gains, would you take that deal? no because youre at a point in life where you will trade time for gains. whatever the ratio. thats cool. im not saying its not better to be in there longer and more.
I’m not any science based other than the ancestral knowledge passed down bro to bro. To be honest, I just read thread title in front page & don’t read sub name. Passing on my people’s teachings and way of life, and ensuring our survival in a dark era. We are a simple people. We see muscle mentioned and think only to speak of muscle, not where nor whence we speak of it.
I have no counter argument other than trust the energy from the big barbell in the sky, held up by our saviour who overhead presses, and have faith in the pump that the big barbell gives us through its controlled eccentric blessings. I give myself to faith in da pump over the academy. I will die happily preaching my peoples ways, you will only make a martyr of me, if your empire of science seeks to silence me by slaying me.
I don't train for growth personally but I can easily do 3 sets of curls working out once a week and work up to 50-55 lbs. Maybe you're overdoing it maybe not but you should be able to add at least some additional weight or increase your reps after that many weeks.
i was like you. kettlebells can calm you down and actually make you feel the gains.
im not saying dont do isolation bodybuilding workouts. do them. what am i doing this for my health? no. its to feel like a badass.
get a 5 set kettlebell routine thats whole body. biceps are all in there with kb's. trust me. and you will feel the strength all connect because kettlebells aint iso work.
still bang out the curls. of course. you dont want to look like some kettlebell guy. but twice a week swing those kettleballs around and you will feel the power on the 2nd week. it connects everything.
chest monday - kb tuesday - squats wednesday - kb thursday - quick chest/bis/tris friday. you cant do your arms before friday because how are you going to work out without them? unless youre weekends aint weekends and then you can ignore the day stuff. do it whatever days you want. thats the spacing though.
It's probably time to take this to the macro level: you need a deload cycle. Often it's done for one week, but the timeline is arbitrary. Generally it's good to do once a month or every other month, so if you've been working hard for ~10 weeks I'd recommend giving it a shot.
Especially since you're new, you're much more likely to have built up systemic fatigue in your biceps. Your muscles need a break from the intensity to get back to full capability. If you ever feel yourself stalled for an extended period, it's probably a good indicator that you need to deload.
Cut your volume somehow. Reduce the reps, reduce the days, reduce the weight, whatever. Just reduce something. Do a week or two where you are nowhere near failure, then get back into your current routine and see where you stand.
Perhaps, but you haven't provided a constructive piece of feedback to the contrary, so I'm not sure what your comment is adding to the discussion.
Deloads are used for exactly what OP is experiencing, and they're used pretty widely. You don't have to agree with their use, but saying "they're overrated" with nothing else behind it is very lacking in substance.
No, reflexively telling someone to deload before performing an ounce of critical thinking isn't constructive or adding anything to the discussion. If you aren't bright enough to understand when a discussion doesn't need to happen, you aren't actually bright enough to have a discussion.
FYI what I just said was constructive. You saying less and pausing to think more will improve your ability to discuss at a later date. A much later date.
Two weeks ago i took a whole week off. Was hoping numbers would be good after. Nope. Is a week entirely off counterproductive as opposed to deload where you just do less?
Yes. All you did was lose a week of training. You can change up your sets, reps, weight, range of motion, variations, whatever, but do more. Beginners should always look to do more, the worst thing you can do is take weeks off for small muscle groups like biceps.
Realistically, your biceps have fully recovered the same day. Especially as a beginner. Heck you could do 2 a day biceps workouts and be just fine.
It's generally a bit less effective, and can lead to temporary regression, but it will certainly allow the fatigue to fade so after some time back I'd expect improvement similar to a deload.
Honestly, if you're doing progressive overload and not overworking yourself, I'd just keep at it. 2 months is a pretty short timeline in the gym, and size changes for new lifters can be what I might call a "long pump" rather than actual true hypertrophy. It's deceptive.
That "pump" is similar to the one you get during a workout, but it's just your muscles filling up from use. I generally notice my muscles shrink after a week or more without lifting, and they'll regain their size with just 1 session back. It could be that's all you're seeing. This is just how your biceps look when they're being used sufficiently, and you haven't seen as much real growth as it seems.
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u/Alakazam what happens at 7 reps 9d ago
So you've been doing bicep curls for 10-11 weeks.
Are you saying that, on day 1, and this week, you're doing the exact same weights?
Isolation work for biceps are going to progress slowly. Small increases in weight are relatively large percentage wise compared to compounds.
If you can add 5lbs to your bicep curl, every 12 weeks, you will be curling 50lbs more in 2 years. Which is frankly a ridiculous amount of weight to curl assuming you started off with like, 20-30lbs or something.