The At-Home Arm Workout: Biceps (video)

“But I don’t have time to workout!”

“But it’s nice outside – the weather is great!  I don’t want to be couped up in a window-less gym somewhere…”

Those are two pretty common complaints I hear from folks who try to reason their way out of sticking with a workout routine.  People want to get in shape, but they can’t seem to make the time to do the necessary work.  Or, just when they do “have the time” and want to get their muscles sculpted to be revealed in their less-than-there outfits, they decide stepping inside a gym would be a mortal sin with the sun shining outside.  And the list of arguments can go on forever.  Believe it or not, I even sometimes find myself thinking up a few when I don’t feel like hitting the weights or going for a run.  But, while you could spend forever thinking of reasons not to work out, let’s just think for a second about a couple reasons to workout.  For the sake of simplicity, let’s use the above two arguments as examples.

For the person who says that they didn’t have the time to workout my answer is workout at home. It’s a hell of a lot easier than driving to the gym (especially when you don’t want to work out in the first place, and it requires less equipment than you think…

For the person who said they didn’t want to be forced to work out indoors during the sunny summer weather my answer is workout outside. If it really is that beautiful outside where you live, workout in your backyard, on your patio, or in a park.  You’ll feel better being outside in the fresh air, and you might even get a tan.

So for this post I whipped up a little video that shows me doing both of those things – working out outside and working out at home.  The equipment I used was an olympic barbell with one hundred pounds worth of weights and two adjustable dumbbells with forty pounds on each. (most people can get by with less weight)

This is a great arm workout that targets the biceps, and, while I normally work both the biceps and triceps when I do an arm workout, it’s a pretty intense to do biceps like this (4 exercises, short rest intervals, approx 12 sets) so I saved triceps for another day.  My recommendation would be to split up biceps and triceps into two workouts (like I’m doing) only if you are going to work extra hard on each one.  Then you can focus more energy on just one muscle group, take your sets to failure and push yourself extremely hard without having to worry about “saving yourself” for the remaining muscle group.

So here it is:

(use the comments section below if you have any questions)