Well week three is coming to an end and I hope you all are feeling well and starting to get into the swing of it. I am going to remind you what I keep reminding myself, do not get discouraged by the lack of immediate results. Be patient. I know that you are in the gym right now busting your ass and not looking like a guy who is in the gym every day and busting his ass. It takes time. You WILL get there. It happens every year.

In the meantime, today’s challenge is going to be a follow up on yesterday’s article. On Monday there will be part 2 in the how to lift series which will deal with the components of this challenge in far more detail, but I think it is good for you to get out there and try it now before reading the article so you can pin point the mistakes you may have made in retrospect.

This week’s challenge is light weight biceps curls — and when I say light weight I mean very light weight.

Go to the light end of the dumbbell rack and take the lightest dumbbells you can find. In my gym that 5 pounders. If you don’t have 5s I am sure you have 10s. These dumbbells should look comically small in your hand and feel comically light.

I want you to take these dumbbells and go to a bench and set the incline to 45 degrees. I want you to hold the dumbbells in the slide grip. This means that your hand should be all the way on the outside of the bar pushing to the far weight on the dumbbell (away from your body). This will cause an imbalance that the biceps will have to combat through a natural supinating move as your reach the top of the lift.

Then I want you to start doing curls. Forget the top 5% on either side of the lift. Curl the weight up until you feel maximum contraction on the arm (like when you were 10 and made a muscle for a girl) and then slowly stretch down to the bottom of the motion also leaving the last 5% of the eccentric motion off. The point of leaving the 5% off at each end is so you never lock out and always leave tension on the muscle. There should never be a point where the weight stops moving and there should never be a moment where the muscle isn’t under tension from the weight.

This is as good a video as any about seated incline dumbbell curls. Keep in mind his motions and posture and lift and everything. He is doing this right.

I want you to do this with those little tiny weights until absolute failure. I want you to lift those weights until your muscle gives up on them and curling them even one more time is just as likely as trying to do it with 80 pound dumbbells. This may take 100 reps, it may take 500 reps and it may take 5000 reps, it doesn’t mater. Keep those weights moving back and forth until you can’t move them any more.

Keep your mind focused intently on the muscles you are targeting (the biceps) and make sure you are lifting with the muscle, contracting as hard as you can on the concentric part of the movement and stretching as far as you can on the eccentric part of the movement.

Never release tension. Never stop moving. Never break mind-muscle connection.

Keep going until failure. This will be good for your arms, your mind and your ego. I want you dropping those weights.

Go get this challenge and make sure you finish out week three strong. Your body should be acclimating to these phase one workouts which means it is almost time for phase 2.

Time to bring the pain.

Grind On!