The BEST Dumbbell Exercises - BICEPS EDITION!

In today’s video we look at the best dumbbell exercises for biceps. We’re going to focus on several areas of training: from strength, to power as well as hypertrophy and a few others you’d expect along with the best way to train the brachialis muscle of the upper arm, which supports the size and app

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today I’m going to show you the best exercises for your biceps. As we’ve been doing in this entire series, I’m going to restrict my selections of these exercises to the use of just dumbbells.

That doesn’t mean that I have to sacrifice anything. As a matter of fact, as you’re going to see in this video, I’m going to show you some superior selections. Provided I get the opportunity to provide context to my selections. As we’ve been doing all along here, we’ve been taking exercises that fit different purposes and categories. We’re going to do the same thing here as well.

I’m going to show you the best options if you’re training for power; for strength; for hypertrophy with an eccentric overload as your focus or method, or a metabolic stress as your method of hypertrophy. I’m going to cover them both. I’m going to show you a corrective exercise you can do. I’m even going to show you a total body exercise. Yes, they do exist when it comes to biceps.

Finally, that miscellaneous category, we’re going to cover an exercise that hits, not just the biceps, but more importantly, the muscle underneath the biceps, the brachialis. That will help you get more rips on your upper arm. The fact is, the selections are based on science and the selections are based around that context. Most of all, you’re going to be armed with the best exercise selections, no matter the purpose or goal you have in your training. So, let’s get started.

So, we kick it all off here with strength and if you haven’t already done so, you’re definitely going to want to watch the chest edition in this series because the selection process of how we got to these strength exercises was very similar. It’s based on the lack of stability when we move from a fixed hand position on a barbell to separate hands controlling dumbbells. Now, how does that play into this? Guys, again, if I had options for a barbell, I’d go right to the barbell curl, as you see me doing here. Whether I’m using a straight bar or an easy bar I love this variation of a curl.

I think it allows us to add the most weight to the bar to get the most strength benefits. But I’ve also covered, in great depth, many times on this channel, how much I like the weighted chin-up. You can see me doing those here. I know I can overload the biceps, once again, because I not only have the additional weight around my waist, but I’ve got the weight of my own body that I’m using to overload those biceps. But that’s not the name of the game because we’re using just dumbbells here.

So, I have to make my selection. But what I do here is I use that same criteria as I did with the bench-press, moving to the dumbbell bench-press. We know that 300lb bench-pressers don’t automatically become 150lb dumbbell bench-pressers. That’s because the stability required at the shoulder becomes compromised and winds up undercutting your strength performance on the exercise. So, the dumbbell variation is not always the best choice.

In the similar case of the dumbbell curl, when I go to move that weight up, I have to be able to counteract that weight coming up. I have to be able to stabilize that with my core because of the posterior driven force of the dumbbells coming up and back, requiring my core to be engaged to do that. So what happens is, if you’re a 130lb barbell curler, you may not be a 65lb dumbbell curler for that very same reason. But you can do something different. You can lift one dumbbell at a time.

What we’ve done is halved the requirements of our core for having to stabilize that much weight coming up and backward. Only 65lbs at a time. You’ll notice you can maximize your strength using a dumbbell one at a time. Again, if I have my overall choice from athleticism, trying to integrate as many areas as possible, I would go with the double handed version of this. The simultaneous curl.

But we’re looking for just strength here, guys. That’s what leads me in the direction of the unilateral curl. But I’m not going to abandon the weighted chin-up. I don’t have to. I have two winners here, guys.

The beauty of this exercise is that I don’t have to sacrifice the weight that I use. Instead of using plates as my form of resistance, all I have to do is take, in this case like I do here, wrap a dog leash around a single dumbbell, and then wrap it around my waist. I jump up on that bar and I’m good to go. I haven’t had to sacrifice the load that I’ve been using if I’ve been using plates in its place. The fact is, when we’re looking for strength overload is the key.

And these two exercises give you the best opportunity to do just that. Next up, we move onto power. What that should automatically trigger in your head by now is if you want to develop power you not only want to be able to move some weight, but you want to be able to move that weight rather quickly. You want to have a speed component, or velocity component, to the weight that you’re lifting. When it comes to developing your biceps there’s one exercise I still choose.

It’s going to look very similar to one we just covered. That is the weighted plyometric chin. Again, we don’t have to weight it as heavy as we did before because we know that velocity is still key. We need to be able to explode through the concentric portion of the rep. Not only that, as I covered in our chest edition, you want to be able to find an exercise that optimally does not restrict you, in terms of your ability to explode through that concentric.

You don’t want to be slowing down dumbbells in the case of a dumbbell bench-press in order to come back down to the bottom and repeat the rep. You’re decelerating at the moment you want to accelerate. Here, if you can get your body moving through the bar on a weighted chin, you’re doing exactly what you need to do. Again, you don’t have to use that much weight here. As a matter of fact, guys might find this so challenging that they use no weight at all.

But guess what? The dumbbell still comes in handy because all you’ve got to do is turn it on its end and use it as a stepping stool to get up to the bar and do these for bodyweight only. The fact is, the plyo-chin-up is one of the most explosive and best ways to train for power when you’re trying to focus on your biceps. Moving onto hypertrophy, we know there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Progressive overload is an option, but we also understand – if we have any training experience – that we wind up drying up on that route because we know we can’t continually add weight to the exercise.

Even the great ones that we’ve selected before. The fact is, we need more options. That comes in the form of the eccentric overload. Eccentric muscle damage. It’s a great stimulator for protein synthesis.

But what we do is select the right exercise. Here, dumbbells come in handy. We do the dumbbell incline curl. But we’re not just doing the dumbbell incline curl because you’ve probably done a lot of them in your lifetime. The fact is, we’re really trying to accentuate the stretch on the biceps.

The eccentric overload of the biceps. To achieve what we’re trying to achieve here. We can do that in a better way by actively contracting the muscle on the opposite side of the elbow and the biceps. That is the triceps. You can see me doing that in the bottom of every rep.

It accentuates the strength of contraction that I’m going to get from the biceps to rebound from that bottomed out position. That’s great, but we also know something else here. When I reach concentric failure I’m not done because we know our muscles are setup in such a way that eccentrica