So the one best tip that you can do when training your biceps is to bend your wrists back slightly on every rep of every exercise. The reason for this is twofold. First, the slightly extended position of your wrist creates a more stable and stronger wrist. When lifting heavy weights, as you would on a barbell curl, the stronger wrist will give you more leverage to do this more safely.
Whenever you go to grasp something and hold on tight, you grab it with your wrist bent back slightly into extension. This is an automatic reaction and is done because your body knows that this is a stronger position to grab from. Yet, when we curl we are often told to never bend back the wrist and instead curl from a strictly neutral wrist position. Here is the problem with that.
When you curl from a weaker more neutral wrist you are begging for the wrist flexors to kick in as the weight gets heavier and fatigue sets in. When this happens, your forearm flexors attempt to “curl” the bar up for you and take the biceps off the hook. The problem with this compensation is that these relatively weak muscles are ill equipped to handle these loads and the force is transmitted to the tendinous attachment on the inside of the elbow.
This is where people will often suffer the medial elbow pain or golfers elbow from doing biceps exercises. Instead, you want to try and take the forearm flexors out of the action by getting the wrist into slight extension. Now we aren’t talking a lot of extension, but rather just 20 to 30 degrees. The key is that you are not actively trying to cheat the bar up with the use of your forearms.
Beyond the injury prevention benefits of the move however are the more popular aesthetic benefits. Doing this will greatly speed up the rate at which you see biceps growth and gains. The reason is simple. Your biceps will now be doing far more of the work than they had before because they are going to have to do more of the lifting. More work being done by the actual muscles you are trying to build, and you are in business.
For some of the exercises shown here like the barbell curl, spider curls, dumbbell supinating curl, chin ups and lip busters, you will see that the position of the wrist varies during different parts of the exercise. In general, as you lift you want to allow the wrist to bend back so you can keep the focus of the contraction on the biceps. You will feel if you are doing this correctly right away because the contraction of your biceps will be better than at any other time.
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