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The bicep spider curl is an arm-blaster exercise. If you haven’t done the spider curl, you will definitely want to add the exercise to your arm routine after reading this article.
One of the primary reasons why the spider curl exercise burns muscle fibers is because it makes the bicep muscles do all the work. As a result, no other muscle group is able to assist the biceps during the spider curls.
Let’s understand how the exercise is done and how it can help you achieve bigger biceps.
How to do spider curl?
You can do a barbell or a dumbbell spider curl using an incline bench or the preacher curl bench. More often than not, individuals use an incline bench to the exercise.
To do the exercise using an incline bench
- Set the incline bench.
- Turn towards the incline bench, and adjust yourself on the incline bench.
- Hold the dumbbells or the barbell (usually EZ-bar), and extend them towards the floor.
- The upper arms should be pressed against the sides of the incline bench.
- It’s extremely important to keep your upper arms vertical and elbow stable.
- Lowering your arms to a full extension, engage your biceps, and curl the bar towards your shoulder.
When you’re doing the exercise using the preacher curl bench, you need to have your hands on the vertical side of the bench. The only difference is that the bench pad ensures that your upper arms and elbows remain vertical and stable. Otherwise, the impact on the biceps is similar.
Points to remember during barbell or dumbbell spider curl
Do not try to use an extremely heavy weight for the exercise. The idea is to activate bigger and smaller muscle fibers in the biceps. An extremely heavy weight can roll your shoulders forward, which is to be avoided at all times.
Use the full range of motion during the exercise so that the impact on the biceps is maximized. The exercise can be used as a part of a superset, as an isolated exercise, or even as a finisher exercise. Eventually, the goal is to use the exercise to activate the short head of the bicep but also have an impact on the long head of the bicep.
It’s important to remember that the short bicep head is responsible for the width, while the long bicep head is responsible for the peak.
How to use spider curl exercise for growing biceps?
As it’s widely known, you cannot focus on just one exercise to build a muscle group. The primary idea is to focus on various bicep exercises to add variation to the routine. Moreover, it allows the muscles to be activated from various angles.
You must focus on progressive overload to build your biceps. That means every time your biceps grow back thicker and stronger, you need to increase the resistance by either increasing the weight the sets or reps. Nevertheless, you must increase the resistance.
Apart from progressive overload, nutrition is of utmost importance. Only bicep curls and progressive overload will not help you if you’re not giving the muscles the nutrition to rebuild themselves.
You must try to consume enough protein that will provide your muscles with the building blocks to rebuild the muscle fibers. You can consume one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight, but if you have a higher body fat percentage, you can consume one gram of protein per cm of your height.
Finally, rest and recovery days are extremely crucial. The spider curl exercise is rather taxing on the biceps. As it’s a smaller muscle group, it will recover faster but you need to allow it time for recovery. The best way to do that is by ensuring that you keep a 48-hour gap between two bicep sessions. In fact, this rule of thumb can be applied to any muscle group.
