If You Have 11-Inch Biceps, Here’s How to Make Them Bigger

Even though the triceps make up 55% of the upper arm according to anatomy, having a set of big ‘ol biceps looks pretty badass – and it’ll help you pull bigger weights!

Drawbacks? None, well, maybe your shirts won’t fit so baggy anymore.

What Exactly Are Your Biceps?

Kids will often come up to me and ask, “Are 11-inch biceps good for a 15-year-old?” or, “Are 11-inch biceps good for a 14-year-old?” even. While those are quite decent numbers, yes, let’s learn about the bicep anatomy first.

The biceps are the muscles on the “front” or the arm’s anterior portion. The biceps may look like one singular muscle, but they are actually different muscles working together:

• The coracobrachialis
• The brachialis
• The biceps brachii

This may be confusing to learn, and I don’t blame you. Anatomy names are even worse to learn than tax laws. Anyways, what you have to know is these three muscles work together to form a functioning bicep:

But knowing is just half the battle – the other half is violence… rest, calories, and progressive overload. If you really want to build big biceps, here are five simple steps to follow:

Step 1 – Lift Heavier, Duh

Think back to the oh-so-distant past when you were in the gym, and usually, the biggest people you know are usually properly strong.

Conversely, the strongest people are usually the biggest… Coincidence? I think not.

We often hear that biceps need to be trained lighter, or they need more volume, or they need something magical compared to other body parts. The reality, however, is that they’re exactly the same as the other muscles in the body.

That means you still need to lift relatively heavy to cause growth. You cannot be messing around with pink dumbbells and believe you’re going to be building pythons. If that were the case, every schmuck with a wrench would have big ‘ol biceps because “VoLuMe BrO!”

This means lifting around 70 – 85% of your one-rep max to relatively close to failure. This would, theoretically, be the best rep and load scheme to cause growth and inch your way closer to 13-inch biceps.

Step 2 – Choose the Right Movements

Yup, that’s right, not all exercises were created equal. Some are prime for the taking and just begging to help you grow. Others, however, want to talk about your vehicle’s extended warranty.

The biggest things to consider are that the movement does not cause you pain, the movement is stable while you contract the target muscle, and you can progress on the exercise.

When it comes to the biceps, most people mess up that second one – stabilizing the movement.

They will swing their arms when doing dumbbell curls, they will swing their whole body when doing barbell curls, and then they will swing by Taco Bell to get mediocre macros to match that mediocre workout.

You have to choose movements that suit you, that you can do and feel the right muscles moving the weight instead of momentum messing everything up.

Here are some of my favorite movements I use with my clients:

• Single Arm Cable Curl (facing away from the cable machine)
• Cable Curl with an EZ Bar
• Preacher Curls with Dumbbells
• Hammer Curls with Dumbbells
• Reverse Curl with EZ Barbell

These are just some of the movements that you can use. There are obviously way too many bicep movements to list in one article, but give these a try and see how you progress.

Step 3 – Fix Your Frequency

Here’s another thought that’s going to be very controversial: You aren’t training your biceps enough… Hard. Basically, you are training your biceps, often enough probably, but you are not giving them enough of a reason to make them grow.

See, a muscle reacts to an external stimulus. Have a lot of stimuli, and you have a pretty good chance that those buggers are going to grow.

Provide too little… Yeah, nothing is going to happen.

You can train your biceps twice per week and see phenomenal growth if you train them correctly. This means you have to do the following:

• Warm up properly
• Train with progressive overload
• Train with good form
• Train the correct movements

Okay, but how do you put all of this together, you may ask? Well, let me show you.

Step 4: Nail Your Bicep Workouts

Now that we have established what is necessary for you to make progressive gains on your biceps, I’m going to help you design a workout. Most people can do this, but not absolute beginners, I would say.

You’re going to have two “bicep” days. One will be at the tail end of your back workout, and one will be an arm day when you will be training both the biceps and triceps. You’ll need a basic gym set-up for these workouts, including dumbbells, a cable machine, and a barbell.

Workout 1: Back and Biceps

Workout 2: Triceps and Biceps

You’ll notice that the reps get fewer as the sets progress. Well, since you will be applying progressive overload, you start heavier, then lower the weight and increase the reps.

If you train close to failure (within 4 reps), and you should, you will find it very difficult to increase the load as the sets go on.

To give you an example, here is what I would do on an arm day:

Rope Curl, Cable:

• Set 1: 110lbs x 7 reps
• Set 2: 90lbs x 10 reps
• Set 3: 80lbs x 12 reps

So, as the weight decreases, the reps increase – as they should.

Step 5 (The Final Step) – Rest and Eat

This is one of the biggest priorities you should have as someone looking to improve their physique. You need to be doing a lot of resting and a lot of eating.

First, Rest

By rest, I literally mean you need to spend a decent amount of time sleeping every night – at least 8 hours. You will grow while you rest, and failing to actually give your body time to recover and grow means you will simply not grow as much. It would also be a good idea to try and lower your stress as much as you can.

Then, Eat (A Lot)

Lastly, you have to eat (a lot) to actually gain muscle mass. This means you have to be in a calorie surplus of at least 200 – 300 calories, and you need to be eating at least 1g of protein per pound of bodyweight.

Those are the absolute basics you need to follow to gain muscle mass.

You have to follow this diet for multiple weeks on end. Doing a bulk that is shorter than 10 weeks will serve no purpose, as it takes a long time to actually build lean muscle tissue. When your weight gain stops, you need to increase your calories by another 200 – 300.

When your goal is to increase size, you’re better off not trying to stay lean – especially if you are still young. The younger you are, the harder you can push in the off-season to gain 10, 20, hell, even 30 pounds!

Obviously, don’t get super fat. But get comfortable with not being shredded year-round. It isn’t very anabolic to be that shredded. If you want bigger arms, get comfy with being uncomfy.

Are 11-Inch Biceps Good? Conclusion

Growing bigger arms is actually a very common goal. Growing your biceps are extremely important, but don’t forget that your triceps make up more of the arm than the bicep does.

That said, you can easily grow your biceps (or really any part of your body) by just following these steps:

• Eat enough calories and protein daily
• Sleep more than 8 hours per night
• Practice progressive overload when training
• Lift with a decent amount of load and intensity
• If needed, increase your frequency of bicep training

Biceps training can be boring to some (myself included), and we’d rather be deadlifting 7 plates per side. An important factor to remember is to keep training fun. So choose movements that you actually like doing and that you can progress on.