Why do you do so many bicep curls?
This doesn't apply to everyone, but it seems that the general consensus is that the biceps are a very important major muscle group that need to have several lifts dedicated to them. Some even have an entire day of their split dedicated to biceps. I understand that everyone wants to tear their t-shirt sleeves when they flex, but is this really the best way of going about it? The following are a few reasons that I believe we all need to cut down on the curls and get back to exercises that involve a bar over our heads.
1.Pull ups (and other compound lifts) are just as much a bicep lift as they are a lat lift. Have you ever thought about why chin ups are easier than pull ups? The reality is that both movements are similar in difficulty for the lats, but pull ups are much harder on the biceps. This means that its not your lats failing at the end of a set, it's your biceps.
2. Your body is going to resist the growth. I'm working on finding the book I read this in, but the idea is that our bodies naturally use our muscles in coordination with each other. This means that our bodies have to keep the relative strengths of the different muscles even, so if you train your biceps out of proportion to your lats your body will recognize that the biceps are becoming biomechanically inefficient and resist their growth.
3. Your lats are not going to fail before your biceps. Some may say, "I would do pull ups, but I'm too worn out, so I'll do bicep curls instead." How would you ever tire out your upper back before tiring out your biceps? If you can do curls, you can do pull ups.
The points I've mentioned here also apply to several other isolation exercises, bicep curls are simply the best example.
I should also mention that I'm not trying to say everyone needs to stop doing bicep curls all together, they can be a great lift in moderation. My point is that there are too many people dedicating too much of their workouts to biceps when they could be doing other lifts that would be much more useful.
I will update this post as I find more of the research that I've based this off of.