If you're having a hard time filling your shirt sleeves and the situation only gets
worse when people look at you from the front. Well, you've got a width problem, and all the
bicep curl variations in the world are not going to solve it. I am glad that I am with you today,
because I'm going to help you to solve that width problem with the only way that I know how. As a
matter of fact, it worked for me and there was one very unfortunate incident that actually led me to
being forced to do all these things I'm going to show you here today once again. And guess what?
They led to the same results that I expected, and I expect to deliver to you today, too.
Because I'm waving around this muscle marker, we have to start by looking a little bit at the
anatomy. When we look at the arm inside of a shirt sleeve, we look and focus of course on the bicep.
But the width of the overall arm is being impacted by not the bicep, but by this muscle right here
and that's the brachialis. And of course, the muscle marker helps me to locate that for you very
easily. But you can locate it for yourself by just simply grabbing your fingers over the top of your
bicep to where it starts to drop in, and right after your fingers, that muscle that pops out
right there is the brachialis. And that's the one that you have to train specifically, if you want
to grow your biceps to be thicker and wider. And guess what? When you grow them this way, this
muscle will also hypertrophy and push the biceps up as well to help you to fill up that shirt
sleeve, no matter what angle people are looking at. Now, I mentioned an unfortunate incident,
it was an injury to my biceps where I actually tore my biceps trying to hold my son up on the
ice. Well, it forced me to change my training around and this is where you're going to benefit.
Because if we look at these biceps again, you can see the difference. This is the end of this bicep,
and this is my elbow. This is the end of this bicep, and this is the elbow. You can see how
much of a difference there is in terms of the gap that's there as a result of that torn bicep.
Well, along with this gap, the torn long head of the bicep created a lack of width,
something that I needed to be able to train around. Not to mention the fact that when I
had the injured bicep, there's a lot of pain with my training. I had to figure out ways to train
around that injured bicep, so I wasn't stressing the area that was so hurt, so I could continue to
kind of progress through my training. Well, when you think about how you're trying to train your
arms right now to get them wider, if you're not dedicating your focus on that brachialis muscle,
then you're not going to grow them. Now, you probably said, great, I got it,
Hammer Curls, I've been doing these for a long time. No. See, the Hammer Curl is not necessarily
fixing your problem, because it's kind of like getting halfway to the solution. And if again,
if you look at this anatomically, you'll see that when I put my arm in this position here,
when I go from a pronated position to a neutral position, look at the action of the bicep. There's
clearly activity in the bicep just to go from a pronated wrist here and forearm to a neutral
forearm, right. We get that bicep activation. Well, in this position here that we perform a
Hammer Curl, we're going to get a decent involvement of the biceps if I'm trying to
turn them off or get them to be less involved, I can't completely turn them off whenever you're
flexing your elbow. But if I want to get them less involved, then I want to perform this variation
instead. This is a Cross Body Hammer Curl, and the main difference is I'm performing it with
that fully pronated forearm. When I get in this position here and I drag my arm up close to my
body, you get a much more intense workload being delivered to the brachialis, which is,
again, exactly that muscle that you're trying to build. So, I worked these into all of my
bicep workouts. Whenever I would either train my arms, a pull workout, or my biceps directly,
this would be the exercise that I chose. Now, I didn't just stop here because I wanted
to be able to make sure I can go back to doing Pullups again, and Chin Ups were out of the
equation for the moment. When the biceps was torn, there was way too much load on them to be
able to withstand any type of chinning activity, so instead I went overhand into the Pullup. But
again, I wanted to minimize the contribution of the biceps. So how do I do that? I take a really
narrow grip. And if you have to use a band like this on the pull up bar to assist you,
then by all means do it, I still want you doing the exercise. You should be able to
do at least 10 to 12 repetitions, whether that be with a band or your own body weight if you
want to start to build this muscle up. So, to do this the hands in narrow you can
see forced that flexion at the elbow. But again, with a pronated grip so I can kind of decrease
some of the contributions of the bicep but focus on getting that really heavy overload of the elbow
flexion. Which again will hit the brachialis really really well. Now this next one was a
bit accidental. Again, remember, I was talking about, I was rehabbing a bicep, but out of all
unfortunate situations, sometimes we really get lucky. In this case I really did because this
is something that I went on to call a Kong Curl, and I did this on Instagram and people actually
really found the exercise to be helpful. But what the focus of this exercise was,
or where it started, was out of a variation of a Cable Curl. When you do a Cable Curl,
the nice thing is there's not so much stress on the bicep in the fully extended position. And as
you can imagine with a torn bicep, I don't want a lot of stress at the fully extended position as
I'm trying to come back and get myself into more intense bicep training. But as I get to the top,
I get good tension at peak contraction of the biceps. Well, I couldn't handle this
in the beginning. So instead, what I did was I just shortened that down a little bit and
performed this variation, which again, we call the Kong Curl. And this is not a chest exercise,
I'm not trying to do a Cable Crossover. What I want you to do from this position is
maintain some of that pronated forearm positioning, and then just curl until
your hand meets your chest, and again, do this in alternating fashion. And at the extended position
here, not only do I have less stress on the biceps because it's in line with that cable, right, so,
the force is through the cable, decrease the tension on the biceps. But it's also because I'm
in that pronated position like we talked about. And what I found was that the thickness of the arm
started to come back much faster than even when I had done workouts that didn't include this.
But then I knew that there's one other thing that I could introduce as well to kind of start
to transition back to regular curls or Dumbbell Curls. And it was this and we call this a Drop
Curl. And what's cool about this exercise is again, it's performed out of a modified
position. I'm not in a fully supinated position at any point in the curl. But what's most notable
here is the speed that I'm doing the exercise at. You want to go very slow and controlled
in the first half of that curl, because we know it's within that first half that the brachialis
is doing more of the work. As we get past the 90-degree mark, the bicep starts to take over,
especially as we get into some shoulder flexion towards the end range of the exercise. So,
if you want this to be really, really effective at building your brachialis, then drop the weight
to the point that you can handle it at a very slow pace and make sure you stop in this mid position,
keeping the tension on the entire time because I drop it from that mid position. The one that's not
working is actually staying in the middle portion of the rep. So, they're both doing a lot of work
one isometrically and one concentrically. All of these exercises, guys round out literally
the width of your arm to give you more of that shirt sleeve filling diameter that you
need to make sure that your arms look good, no matter what angle people look at you from.
And remember you've heard it before, and it's true, that as that muscle starts to build up,
it lies underneath deep to the biceps. It's going to have that impact of pushing the biceps up
to give you not just the width, but also the height. If you're looking to get wider arms,
guys, there's no way around this. This is one of those situations where it's the muscle that's
responsible for that. And when you just skip past it by not doing direct work for the brachialis,
you will never have the width in your biceps that you need to. So, if you have to, substitute 1 or
2 of those extra variations of curls that you're doing right now for a brachialis exercise or two,
and I promise you you'll be on the right path. But if you really want to start to get them to
grow faster, dedicate an entire workout to your brachialis maybe once a week in addition to
your regular arm or pull training and I promise you, you'll start to see those gains come quite
quickly. If you're looking for more science-based tips and exercises, you can find them not only
here on this channel, but over at Athleanx.com. If you haven't done so, click Subscribe and turn on
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