Also, don’t just do curls. There are different “heads” to the biceps muscle and there are different areas of the muscle in which to create microtears.
There are:
curls
hammer curls
e-z bar curls
flat bar curls
reverse e-z bar curls
reverse dumbbell curls
and a dozen others to play with.
You also want to work your triceps on alternate days (or on a third day) to gain actual strength because this muscle complements the contracting motion of the biceps. Besides which, the look of “guns” comes mostly from triceps.
You also want to make sure you’re not cheating with your back or shoulders or lats. With that in mind, you should also be working those muscles so that they don’t sneak in to help out the biceps.
Furthermore, add me to the chorus of people diagnosing your problem as mental. They key to beating a plateau is to throw more weight at it. Counterintuitive but true. And sometimes the key to getting real sustained work done is to be around people demonstratively bigger and stronger than you, simply because they’re proof that you too can get the work done to look like you want to.
I’d recommend checking out the forums at bodybuilding.com. Granted, there are some meatheads on there, but also a lot of great advice regarding workout routines and nutrition.
Also, if your goal is to get stronger, I’d say there is a lot you can do before you start working on just your biceps. Bench press, squats, and deadlifts come to mind.
I think ultrafilter was putting two points together earlier.
One: if you want to get stronger at a particular exercise (say curls), you need to increase weight.
Two: If you want to really get stronger, you do to increase weights AND do movements and “exercises that involve multiple joints” (as he said).
So, you might take your dumbbells, and do “Turkish Get Up” (youtube it), or “Clean and Press” (with dumbbells) or something like that. . .something that engages your legs, core, shoulders, etc.
I’ve been talking about this a little around here, but if you look around the crossfit.com site, they seem to have a great philosophy about doing full body, full range of motion stuff. You don’t need to buy into what they’re doing, but there might be some good info for you there to pick and choose from.
If you’re looking to get big biceps, keep doing curls. If you really want to get fit, do some push-ups and sit-ups. Get active with the dumbbells: do one-legged squats with dumbbells. Full range of motion squats. Cleans. Presses. Go walk a half mile with 12kg in each hand.
Trunk I already have a routine of eight different dumbell-related excercises. If I rush I can get my whole day’s workout done in just over an hour, but if I take my time - two hours.
Every other day I go for long walks. If it’s a work-day 3 hours before work. If it’s a non-work day about 4 or 5 hours (walking from the coast to the highest peak of the isle of man)
(on the 4/5 hour work I carry my camera rucksack which is reasonably heavy - it has an eos 30d camera, an 17-70 lens, a 50-500 lens and various other things)
I think your biggest mistake is lifting weights every day. Don’t lift weights every day, your body doesn’t get enough rest that way. Only lift 3-4 times a week with plenty of protein, sleep and cardio in between workouts. When you do lift, listen to what the other dopers are saying - only do 3 sets of each exercise, and only go up to six reps. If you have a workout buddy, your set should go like this:
first 4 reps - OMG my eyes are about to burst out of their sockets this is so heavy.
last 2/3 reps - just like the first four reps + your buddy is helping you.
So you should aim for a weight that is too heavy for you to do 6 reps with on your own. Initially you will find yourself cheating in order to cope with the weight(for biceps you’ll probably use your back to help yourself), but thats ok, you can improve your form once you get used to high intensity lifting
This is basically what I’ve always done, and when I stuck to it religiously, I never failed to gain size and strength in a relatively timely fashion.
I tended to do it more like this though:
I’d try to do 3 sets of 10. I’d raise the weight if I could get between 5-9 on all 3 sets. Usually, if I didn’t need more weight, it was more like 10-8-4 or 9-7-3.
Actually this happens to me on some of the types of excercies.
I have made an excel chart with 'reps,sets,reps,sets’reps,sets columns.
If I were able to do the same number of reps each set then only the first two columns would get anything in them (‘10’,‘3’) but a lot of the time it’s more like this… (‘10’,‘1’,‘8’,‘1’,‘7’,‘1’)
Oh, man, I hated sets like 10-7-4. You hit the 10 and you want to add weight, but you think you might not be able to carry through the rest of the set at the higher weight. Do you add weight or not?
My answer was usually not. I only added weight if I knew I could get over 5 reps on all three sets.
For some reason, these odd sets where I would hit 10 reps on the first set, but fail to get 5 reps on the third set, with the same weight, were mostly on the incline bench press.
They key to beating a plateau is to throw more weight at it. Counterintuitive but true. And sometimes the key to getting real sustained work done is to be around people demonstratively bigger and stronger than you, simply because they’re proof that you too can get the work done to look like you want to.