Finishing Your Biceps Workout - The Proven Way by Chris Gethin

To finish your biceps workout with this drop set, you'll need a lower block, a step platform, and a high pain threshold. The pain will be strong, but it's worth it!

Author: Chris Gethin

For most athletes, biceps training revolves around core exercises such as barbell curls, dumbbell curls, dumbbell hammer curls, and curls. Want to add variety? Just change the angles: do a barbell raise on a Scott bench, in which the arms are in front of the body, or dumbbell raises on an incline bench, in which the arms are behind the plane of the body.

To build a workout, the basic exercises are ideal. But if you want to raise the bar and give your biceps a shock treatment at the end of your training session, consider underrated hook raises.

Or even better, do the exercise using the brutal drop set protocol. I personally vouch for its effectiveness!

Regular biceps curls are performed with the elbows pressed to the sides; the trajectory of the rod movement describes a semicircle. The hook lift has a fundamentally different biomechanics; while lifting the working weight, you take your elbows back. The projectile moves strictly up and down, close to the body.

With the hook lift, the range of motion is much shorter than in classic curls, and therefore I prefer to perform this variation at a slow pace. With a shortened range, you get a great opportunity to focus on the position of peak contraction, which is somewhere at the level of the upper six-pack abs, in each repetition.

It should be noted that almost every exercise for biceps involves the front deltas to one degree or another, and if you raise your elbows to raise the barbell or dumbbells higher, the participation of the shoulders becomes even more significant. In lifting with a hook, the muscles of the shoulder girdle are almost completely switched off. With increased isolation comes a deep muscle burning sensation, which is exactly the type of stimulus you are looking for.

Everyone who is familiar with my approach to the training process knows that it is difficult to unleash the full potential of the exercise without intensifying the effect. With the hook lift, it's the same story: the ideal way to execute the movement is using a lower block for a drop set marathon.

I see two reasons for the incredible effectiveness of the lower block. First, it allows you to keep the biceps under load all the time, from the starting position to the position of peak contraction. Secondly, the direction of the counter force vector affects the nature of the recruitment of muscle fibers; instead of fighting gravity, you are forced to resist a force that pulls the projectile not only down, but also at a certain angle.

When doing a hook lift, I like to give my all, sparing no effort. I start with a working weight that I can lift 10-15 times, then quickly reduce the tonnage by 25% and continue the approach, doing another 10-15 repetitions. Sometimes after that I reduce the weight again. Then, after 60-second pauses, I pump my arms with a full drop set 2 or 3 more times. The destructive power of drop sets leaves the biceps hungry for growth.