To get huge biceps, it’s important to train both hard and smart. Biceps are a relatively small muscle and for some people they can take a long time and a lot of hard work to develop. The longer your arm span, and the shorter your muscle insertions are, the harder it will be to develop bulging full biceps.

Try this test. Flex the bicep of your right arm. Take your left hand and see how many fingers you can fit between your bicep and your elbow. The more fingers you can fit, the “shorter” your muscle insertion is and the harder it will be to develop full big biceps. One to two fingers, and you have fairly long insertions, and thus good bicep potential. Three or four, and you’ll find it hard to add much mass to your biceps.

If this is you, you’re going to have to train the hardgainer way. Don’t worry though, this is the most effective way to build bicep size, and get pretty damn strong in the process. You can’t afford to waste your bicep training doing endless sets of cable and machine curls – they’ll tire your arms out, but at the same time they are probably the least effective type of growth stimulus.

To get huge biceps, you’ll need to go hardcore. Here’s an example bicep routine:

Close grip Chins 3 sets of 6-10
Barbell Bicep Curls 3 sets of 8-10
Alternating Dumbbell Curls – 2 sets of 8-10

This bicep workout is designed to be performed once or twice per week. As you can see, its based around bodyweight and free-weight exercises. These exercises have been proven again and again to elicit the largest growth and strength responses, and will serve you much better than cables and machines. (If you really want to learn how to build whole-body muscle, week in week out, then you can check out Vince Delmonte’s program here, which I highly recommend). If you can drink some whey protein immediately after your workouts, and work your whole body in a weekly split, then you’ll be well on your way to huge biceps.