Body And Fitness Blog

Biceps and Triceps

Went for a workout with Dan today, it’s becoming a bit of a regular thing (happened twice so far!) but will happen more and more often I guess. I quite enjoy my workouts with Dan, we tend to have a laugh but also get the weights done too!

We started off our workout with some preacher curls using the EZ Curl bar. I’ve never done preacher curls, so it was a new experience for me! Did a couple of warmup sets to start us off, just 20kg then 25kg for 10 reps. Afte that went into my working sets:

• 40kg x 4 reps (bit too heavy, clearly being a bit ambitious!)
• 30kg x 8 reps (more like it)
• 30kg x 8 reps

We followed this up with some negatives using 40kg. The plan was to get the bar to the top of the curl, then slowly over the course of 30 seconds lower the bar back to the start. We did a couple of sets of this, and managed 25 seconds for the first set and then 30 seconds for the second set. After doing this my biceps were feeling really pumped!

However, this wasn’t the end of our bicep workout, we finished it off by doing some heavy duty cable curls. I’m fairly certain that the weight stack on Dan’s gyms’ cable machine is in pounds and not kilograms because I was able to do my first heavy duty set at 50, which is a lot heavier than I would achieve in kilograms. My first set consisted of 10 reps, taking about 1:20 in total, my second set consisted of 10 reps at 45kg taking about 1:30 in total.

After this, my biceps were well and truly beaten into submission, and today they have been sore (I’m writing this post the day after the workout). Though, this soreness could also have something to do with the fact that I had one to many pints last night…

Triceps

Started off our tricep workout with some barbell tricep extensions, using the EZ Curl bar. I used to do this exercise a lot when I was a teenager, and never really enjoyed because it always seemed to put a lot of strain on my elbow joint, and the pain from that always meant that my sets came to an end when I could take the pain no longer, rather than when my triceps had failed. Ten years or so on and this is still the case. I managed a couple of sets at 30kg, only for 10 and 7 reps respectively, after which I’d had enough.

After tricep extensions, I went onto dips, lying between two benches. Did the first set with just my bodyweight, then two sets with a 20kg plate on my legs, and the last set with 30kg of plates (20kg & a 10kg in case you were wondering) on my legs. I only managed 8 reps on this last heavy set, but it didn’t have give my triceps a workout!

After finishing ticeps, I did some abdominal exercises, which consisted of 3 sets of decline bench sit ups for 20 reps each set. I should have done some planks and leg raises as well, but was aware of how long we had already spent working out…