Weighted chin-ups are fantastic but the idea that getting strong at them ensures massive biceps is not true. Black and white, minimalist thinking needs to die because it’s misinformation that continues to hurt your gains. I’m tired of hearing the nonsense that curls and isolation exercises are worthless when in reality, adding them to your routine is ideal. See, there’s a big difference between effective and optimal training or what works or what is the best. What is the best? Isolating your arms with curls and not relying on indirect stimulus.
If you’re doing rows, chin-ups and lat pull-downs yes you can get decent bicep development but you’ll never maximize the gains. Not in a million years! We have countless of lifters online who have strong chin-ups but weak and small biceps. Why? We don’t know how much the back is contributing to the exercise, and if the biceps are truly hitting their limit. Your back will likely fail before your biceps do, and even with super high reps or heavy loads they still won’t be exhausted to their full capacity. For torso dominant lifters, this is a nightmare. So why are we basing our bicep strength off an exercise that uses an enormous amount of back? It doesn’t make sense, if you want to see how strong your biceps really are, simply do a strict curl. For example, I’ve been doing pullup/chinup specialization for well over a year now and my performance skyrocketed to the point of doing 165lbs for a 1RM. Guess what? Biceps barely improved, and curling strength is still poor. Can’t say I’m surprised, but the minimalists would argue that 165 isn’t enough, just do 185 and everything will be fine. My question is, how is that feasible for most lifters especially when there’s no guarantee it will work for carryover or correcting lagging biceps? On the other hand, a stronger curl is 100% going to work. Inducing progressive overload on barbell curls, hammer curls, cable curls, etc is the proper way.
I’ll say this, if you can strict curl anywhere between 135 and 185 your biceps will be much bigger than a guy who only does chinups. I believe there are gifted lifters that can get away with sub-par training, but for guys like you and me it’s problematic. That’s what distinguishes the freaks and normal dudes, and explains why I favor maximized programming. Keep doing your chin-ups since it will be helpful, but don’t rely on them exclusively. Mix in volume and intensity on curls for the best gains. It’s the preferred method of all bodybuilders for a reason, just saying.
