Bodyweight Biceps Exercises for Home Workouts

Despite the popular stereotype in fitness and bodybuilding that you need exercise equipment or other equipment to pump up muscles, calisthenics offers a set of movements without the use of weights. Biceps exercises without dumbbells or other equipment allow you to sufficiently work the muscle, ensuring an increase in volume, strength and endurance. This is also one of the best ways to maintain physical fitness at home when it is not possible to go to the gym or use sports equipment.

Is it possible to pump up the biceps without dumbbells and a horizontal bar?

Training with your own body weight at home is quite possible. It showed the many programs that came up during the quarantine. Even though such training is slightly less effective than training in the gym, it allows you to develop and progress.

The arsenal of possibilities without a horizontal bar essentially comes down to a couple of movements. But if you have a crossbar, you can fully train your biceps using a whole series of exercises. Read more about training biceps on the horizontal bar →

It is also important to remember that to ensure muscle growth, you need to perform 6 to 10 sets per group per week. They can be done in one workout, but it is better to divide them into 2 sessions. These should be hard failure or pre-failure sets. In addition to pumping, do not forget about proper nutrition with a calorie surplus and an abundance of protein foods, as well as recovery. Without these aspects, no program or exercise can provide results.

Options for home

When considering ways to pump up your biceps without dumbbells, you should consider two options:

1. training without any equipment;
2. and training with your own body weight in the presence of a crossbar.

Bicep push-ups

This is the only exercise that can be done on the floor for biceps. It is important to perform the movement not in quantity, but at a slow pace and under control, feeling the tension in the target muscle.

Technique:

1. Assume a push-up position, but place your hands at stomach level. Turn your palms to the side and away from you (at an angle of 45 degrees).
2. Do push-ups, bending your elbows, try to lower your body so that your chest is 1-2 cm from touching the floor.
3. Straighten your arms with a powerful movement and repeat the movement.

This exercise may seem difficult at first, so try to perform 5-6 repetitions per set, gradually increasing the number of repetitions to 10 or even 15.

Biceps pull-ups on the horizontal bar

If you have a bar, this is the main movement with which you can pump up impressive volumes of biceps. In addition to the biceps brachii, it also uses the rest of the muscle areas of the arms, as well as the anterior deltoids. This can be considered an advantage, as it helps to increase the total mass of the shoulder girdle and upper limbs.

Technique:

1. Hang from the bar, holding it with an underhand grip. Place your hands optimally at shoulder width.
2. Pull yourself up, trying to pull your chin towards the bar.
3. Pause, then return to the starting position at a slower pace.

Horizontal pull-ups

This is a movement that works with any low bar, raised support, TRX loops, or other devices that allow you to grab your hands at chest or stomach level.

Technique:

1. Grab the bar with an underhand grip. Tilt your body so that you rest on your heels. The body should be straight from the feet to the shoulders and neck.
2. Bend your elbows, trying to bring your upper chest to the bar as close as possible.
3. Pause and slowly return to the starting position.

If there is no low bar, then you can do pull-ups on a table with a straight grip.

Recommendations for training

By far, the biceps is the most difficult muscle group to train without weights. This is due to the fact that without weights it is difficult to duplicate the function of the muscle. However, biceps-focused push-ups and reverse-grip pull-ups are the two main movements that allow calisthenics to build impressive biceps mass and strength.