To complete your bicep workout with this drop set, you will need a lower block, a step platform, and a high pain tolerance. The pain will be intense, but it will be worth it!

Author: Chris Gethin

For most athletes, biceps workouts revolve around basic exercises such as barbell curls, dumbbell lifts, hammer dumbbell lifts, and upper or lower block curls. Want to add some variety? Just change angles: do a Scott bench lift with your arms in front of your body, or a dumbbell lift sitting on an incline bench with your arms behind the plane of your body.

Basic exercises are ideal for building a workout. But if you want to raise the bar and give your biceps shock therapy at the end of your training session, consider the underrated hook lifts.

Or even better, do the exercise using the brutal drop-set protocol. I personally vouch for its effectiveness!

What is hook lift?

Regular biceps curls are performed with the elbows pressed to the sides; the trajectory of movement of the bar describes a semicircle. Lifting with a hook has a fundamentally different biomechanics; when lifting a working weight, you pull your elbows back. The projectile moves strictly up and down, close to the body.

The range of motion is much shorter in the hook lift than in the classic curl, and therefore I prefer to do this at a slow pace. With the shortened amplitude, you get a great opportunity for each rep to focus on the peak contraction position, which is somewhere in the level of the upper abdominal cubes.

It should be noted that in almost every exercise for the biceps, the front deltas are involved to some extent, and if you raise your elbows to raise the barbell or dumbbells higher, the participation of the shoulders becomes even more significant. In lifting with a hook, the muscles of the shoulder girdle are almost completely turned off. As the degree of isolation increases, comes a deep muscle burning sensation, which is exactly the type of stimulus you are looking for.

Grappling hooks in merciless drop sets

Anyone familiar with my approach to training knows that it is difficult to reach the full potential of an exercise without intensifying the effect. The hook lift is the same story: the ideal move is with a lower block for a marathon of drop sets.

I see two reasons for the incredible effectiveness of the bottom block. Firstly, it allows you to keep the biceps under load all the time, from the starting position to the position of the peak contraction. Secondly, the direction of the reaction force vector affects the nature of the recruitment of muscle fibers; instead of fighting gravity, you are forced to resist the force that pulls the projectile not only down, but also at a certain angle.

When doing a hook lift, I like to give my best, sparing no effort. I start with a working weight that I can lift 10-15 times, then quickly decrease the tonnage by 25% and continue the approach, doing another 10-15 repetitions. Sometimes after that I reduce the weight again. Then, after 60-second pauses, I pump my arms with a full drop-set 2 or 3 more times. The destructive power of drop sets leaves the biceps hungry for growth.

Finish Bicep Curl Workout by Chris Gethin

Hook lift biceps workout finish

It is better to save this kind of finishing the muscle for the end of the biceps workout, because after the drop sets the fuel tanks will be empty. As the pumping and burning in the biceps intensifies, I try to focus even more on the technique and quality of each rep. In my opinion, technique and cleanliness are more important in the lifting than the working weight, which makes the exercise an ideal choice for medium- to multi-repetitions or drop sets.

To make this exercise even more effective, try a couple of interesting tricks:

• To increase the counter force of the block in the starting position, stand on a step platform. When your weight hits the load stack between repetitions, you lose efficiency. The step platform will allow you to increase your range of motion without losing weight.
  
• Try doing a hook lift in Smith, which gives a completely different sensation and makes the bar go up and down strictly in a given plane.

Give this workout a try. You may soon be surprised that you unfairly ignored the hook lift!

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