Retro Reps: Why Dorian Yates Started Bicep Days With Seated Curls – Muscles & Fitness

Some athletes go to the gym and repeat their training over and over again, while others use each session as an opportunity to learn from both their successes and failures. Luckily, a recent Instagram post addressed the 1992–1997 Mr. Olympia introduced us to his experimental formula for pumping up the perfect biceps. Here’s how to try it yourself.

Most of us know that to build big biceps you need to exhaust the long head of the outer biceps, the short head in the inner muscle and thirdly the brachialis aspect of the biceps closest to the triceps. Because you need to hit the arms from different angles to stimulate these three areas, one size doesn’t necessarily fit all when it comes to curls. However, what fewer people understand when they pick up a barbell or barbell is how to get the best muscle activation. Fortunately, the man they called “The Shadow” shed some light on his thinking.

Dorian Yates started with dumbbell curls

Getting granite like biceps was not just a passion for Yates, but a science that the master of muscles approached in great detail. “First exercise for biceps, seated dumbbell curls,” the English bodybuilding icon confirmed of his winning strategy. “I’ve experimented with the order of exercises over the years and found that when I first performed barbell curls, it over-engaged my anterior deltoids and forearms,” Yates explained to his nearly 2 million Instagram followers.

This was a problem for the competitive bodybuilder because when you focus on the biceps, you don’t want your shoulders to carry the load. One way to reduce over-recruitment of the deltoid would be to reduce the weight on the barbell, but that’s not the kind of ‘Blood and Gut’ position that Dorian Yates put forward during his Olympia forays. “So I first went with direct isolation exercises, like seated curls, Nautilus curls, or dumbbell concentration curls,” Legend explains.

These seated biceps curl variations are a great isolation exercise because the body is stabilized by the chair, meaning fewer other body parts need to be involved. After some trial and error, Yates decided he would start his sweat-filled sessions with the most targeted isolation movements possible, in order to be able to engage his muscles with full intention. Compared to a standing barbell curl, you’ll feel less like swinging with the momentum, so if you focus on controlling the movement, you’ll activate the desired biceps muscle instead of rocking your core.

Dorian Yates’ approach to biceps curls

The Olympia icon shared that the goal when doing his bicep curls was to produce a full range of motion, “with a big push at the top,” he explained. Despite the heavy dumbbells he was working with, the big man still used a “controlled, slow negative” for maximum time under tension, further focusing on biceps activation.

To get as many reps as possible, Legend further explained, “You’ll see that I start the exercise with both arms and after I’ve done 6-8 reps, I take a few deep breaths and switch to curling one arm at a time, which allowed me to get a few extra reps in with little help and pure focus on each arm.” That sounds like a timeless plan to build bigger biceps.

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