This Spider Curl Finisher Blasts Your Biceps With Time Under Tension
The key to building rock-solid biceps with baseball-sized peaks has never been massive amounts of weight. Instead, it's about technique, and getting an optimal squeeze on your biceps, without cheating the rep and involving other muscles. It's also about owning the negative and challenging your biceps at the toughest points of every biceps curl rep.
You'll do both things in the Mixed-Style Spider Curl Countup, a new biceps finisher from Men's Health fitness director Ebenezer Samuel, C.S.C.S. The move blends two critical mechanisms for muscle growth — time-under-tension and mind-muscle connection — into a precision exercise that'll leave your biceps crying. "We're bringing a few ideas into play here," says Samuel, "combining them all to help you earn critical squeezes on every rep."
The key to the Mixed-Style Spider Curl Countup is how it blends the isolation focus of the spider curl with pauses and time-under-tension. You'll spend extra time with your forearms parallel to the ground, a position that makes your forearm lever long and challenges your biceps, says Samuel. "We've done this on other curl variations before," says Samuel, "but in those situations, it's always possible to find a way to cheat, shifting your elbows forward. That gets harder on the isolation-focused spider curl. Here, you'll know you're cheating and can put a stop to it."
You also face greater time-under-tension on every rep, thanks to the countup sequence, which has you pausing for 1 second on your first rep, then an extra second on each successive rep. That leaves you that much more fatigued on that last full curl rep you do. "And it means you need that much more focus to pull it off," says Samuel.
You'll need dumbbells (or an alternate load of some sort) and an incline bench to pull it all off. Get ready to grow some arms.
Set an incline bench to a 30 or 45-degree angle. Lie on the bench, core tight, dumbbells held at your sides, upper arms perpendicular to the ground.
Curl the dumbbells upwards, moving only at the elbow. Lower down until your forearms are parallel with the ground. Pause here for one second.
Lower all the way, then follow with a standard biceps spider curl. That's 1 pair of reps.
Repeat the process on the next pair of reps, this time pausing for two seconds when your forearms are parallel with the ground.
Keep repeating the process until you've completed a six-second pause. Do 3 sets like this.
The Mixed-Style Spider Curl Countup is best used as a finisher at the end of a biceps workout, blasting your biceps with time-under-tension after you’ve rocked them with heavier-weight moves. You can also use it as a superset exercise, pairing it with a triceps exercise for a total-arm burn, says Samuel. “Try pairing this with, say, bodyweight skullcrushers at the end of a full arms supersets session,” says Samuel. “Your arms will be one fire.”
For more tips and routines from Samuel, check out our full slate of Eb and Swole workouts. If you want to try an even more dedicated routine, consider Eb's New Rules of Muscle program.
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