The biceps are the most common muscle people try to tone and gain lean mass while training at the gym. With nearly thousands of different types of exercises that will give you results, you don’t need to be doing every bicep exercise the gym has to offer. Essentially, they are all doing the same thing after a while, so why waste your precious time?

One of my favorite exercises to build bigger biceps is called Running the Rack.  

Bodybuilders and your typical gym goers all have trained their biceps with this routine so why shouldn’t you?  To run the rack, you do not allow your muscles to rest between repeated sets of the same exercise. This is not a difficult way to train; you just have to know your maximum weight you can hit before needing rest.

“Running the rack” for your biceps requires several dumbbells (An alternate to dumbbells is cables or the arm curl machine) of weights.

To start, you need to know which weight you can efficiently curl for one set of 10-12 reps efficiently before you need to rest. If your starting out, just grab one off the rack and see where you land.  After you have that figured out, you’re about ready to begin to build those bigger biceps you dream of!

Choose a starting weight that is about 25% of you max weight. For example, if your maximum weight is 40 pounds, then begin with an 8 or 10 pound weight. Don’t feel embarrassed if your curling an 8-pound weight and you see someone next to you curling 80 pounds; more than likely they have been developing their biceps for quite some time.

With those 10-pound dumbbells, stand up straight, bend your knees slightly and do 5 reps of bicep curls with each arm. Set aside the first set of dumbbells and jump right into the next weight without resting. Do 5 reps, and then move onto the next. Once you have curled your max weight, immediately you will begin to reverse down the rack and do 5 more repetitions of each weight till you get back down to your starting weight.

For example, if you start at 10 pounds, do 5 reps on each arm. Without resting, you’ll jump to 15 pounds performing 5 reps on each arm, then onto 20 pounds and 5 reps. (25 pounds with 5 reps, 30 pounds with 5 reps, to your max of 40. Then reverse back down to 30 pounds of 5 reps, to 25 pounds with 5 reps all the way back to your starting weight. By the time you finish, your arms are going to be on fire! Then you can finally rest.

Grab some water, and give running the rack one more shot. If you succeed in making it all the way up and back down a second time, your arms will be burning (in a good way) and you’ll immediately begin to see your bicep swell. Now that you know how to run the rack, go grab those dumbbells and we’ll see you at the gym.

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