The Ultimate Guide to 21’s
Biceps are a tricky muscle group to grow. Some people are blessed with great bicep genetics, others aren’t so lucky and its’ their worst body part.
A lot of us try workout after workout to try and build up our arms. Most of the time, this is almost pointless. Nothing seems to get them to grow as much as other body parts.
Sometimes, its’ smart to switch things up a bit, especially when we don’t seem to be gain strength or even size. To get bigger, you need to stimulate the muscle more than you did the last time you trained it.
When we stall, we need to temporarily incorporate a variety of training methods to further stimulate the muscles past what they’re used to.
This can be done by a variety of training techniques including but not limited to; Eccentric training, Rest- pause training and 21’s.

If you want to learn how to get bigger arms, check out these two articles: How to get bigger biceps and How to get bigger arms

What are 21’s
21’s are simply a training technique mostly used for biceps, however it can be used for most body parts. Like most training techniques, 21’s are simply a method of pushing past failure, past the point of exhaustion to keep going.
This training technique focuses on extended periods of time under tension (TUT) and partial reps to overload your muscles.
21’s are an awesome way to increase the intensity for any workout, as well as to further stimulate the muscle than your usual routine will, not to mention these are awesome for stretching your fascia and giving you a huge pump.
To really allow your muscles to reach their full potential, incorporating 21’s every once in a while will certainly help.
21’s were invented decades ago and are still popular today, that should tell you exactly how useful this technique is.

How to do 21’s
Performing 21’s is easy, it’s intense, but not that complicated.

• Perform: 7 reps of Partial Curls – Top range of the movement.
• Perform: 7 reps of partial curls – Bottom range of the movement.
• Perform: 7 reps of Full Range Curls.

Variations of 21’s

There are multiple variations with performing 21’s. Here are my top 2.

Version A

• Perform: 7 reps of partial curls – Bottom range of the movement.
• Perform: 7 reps of full range curls
• Perform: Isometric hold for as long as possible, when the weight starts to get to heavy, focus on prolonging the eccentric contraction as long as possible.

Version B

• Perform: 7 reps of full range curls- Focusing on the negative contraction
• Perform: 7 reps of partial curls – Top range of the movement
• Perform: 7 reps of partial curls – Bottom range of the movement with 2 second isometric pause for each rep.