What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today I'm going to show you five ways to start building up those bicep peaks of yours to
get them to stand at attention and we're using two muscle markers to get the job done.
So without further ado, let me start drawing all over this damn arm to make it that much
easier for you to understand.
Okay, so as you can guess, the bicep is a two headed muscle, with each head having a
different attachment here in the shoulder, which allows us to hit it a little bit differently,
and in influence it a bit differently depending upon the exercise we choose and the way we
do the exercises.
That being said, you have to see which one is which.
Right here we have a short head and a long head.
Now, the short head is going to be the one that is closer to the inside of our body – closer
to our chest – and the long head is going to be on the outside.
But we could actually get more specific than that with the markers.
So you can see that right there, you can almost see as light shading right along that line
right there.
More importantly you can see that as the bicep comes around the corner it kind of comes up
and then it starts to go off in that direction.
That little turn is the bottom of the short head.
So if we go and take our marker, we can come around this way, up under here, and of course
it's going to go over our shoulder which we'll take a look at in a second.
Then right where it makes that turn, right up in through here, it comes down, and then
it comes back down through here.
So we've got the short head of the bicep looking like that.
Now, what leaves the long head?
The rest of it.
So if we take our other marker here, we've got the long head coming up and around this
way and back, and then diving down that way.
So now, the important point to make here is that the long head is actually the one responsible
for the peak.
The peak is happening right up here on top of the bicep.
The long head is the one responsible for that peak.
The medial head – or the short head – is the one responsible more for bicep width.
You can see when my arm from here is what is responsible for the width of the bicep.
That doesn’t mean we don’t want to train both areas, but if we're talking about bicep
peaks here, this is how we're going to go get it.
So taking a quick look beneath the surface here and putting the science back in strength
as we like to do, you'll see that the long head bicep tendon actually crosses on the
further outside potion of the arm and it attaches to the top of what we call the glenoid, or
the ball and socket joint.
Right in here, right in through the heart of the joint.
Whereas the short head of the bicep, more on the inside portion of the arm attaches
to what they call the coracoid process, which is right there.
You can see quickly – something I'll elaborate more on a future video – the short head
of the biceps never really get in trouble or cause much pain because it's further out
of the joint, away from all the action.
Whereas the long head runs right up this groove and it frays itself over and back, up and
down as you raise your arm and can tend to get inflamed and often times be misdiagnosed
as something like a rotator cuff tear.
We can go over that more in the future, but the point being is the locations here do have
different impacts on the exercises that you do.
That leads us perfectly to our first point.
That is, if you want to target the long head more then you want to makes sure that your
grip is narrow and your elbows are close to your body.
So if you look at something like this you're going to see the area that you can actually
see is the area that you're actually working.
It's the way that it works here for the biceps.
When we take our grip wide and we take our elbows away from our body the more area we
can see here is going to be the inside – short head – that's getting more o the attention.
So if you were going to try to build bigger bicep peaks, if you're doing an exercise like
a curl, watch as I grab here.
A narrow grip.
You can feel that right away.
If you do a cross body curl, this way here, you can see that you're really focusing on
that elbow tight, narrowing positioning and you can feel it immediately here and in the
outer head, or the long head of the bicep.
The next point actually relates to a mistake that a lot of us make when we're doing our
bicep training.
It has a direct impact on the strength of contraction, ultimately the bicep peaks that
you can get from your bicep training.
That is, you never want to have your wrists participating too much in the bicep curl because
the more your wrist participates the more your forearm is and the less your bicep is.
So one of the best ways you can actually help to build your peak is to keep your wrists
bent backward throughout the exercise.
We like to call that a "Waiter's Tray" position.
Watch, I'm doing a basic barbell curl again.
Now, the common way to do this is as we get fatigued we try to curl too much with our
forearm trying to get some extra help.
That is, in fact, taking some of the good work away from the biceps.
What we want to do is eliminate that; get the forearms out of this.
It's not their job at the moment.
Keep them in this backward, waiter position and you should immediately feel a much stronger
contraction at peak contraction on the curl.
This is something that can apply to every single bicep exercise that you do, even this
bicep chin curl that I'm doing.
You can notice that I'm keeping my wrist in this slightly extended position throughout,
just to make sure that the focus is never on the forearms, but all on the biceps.
The third thing you want to do is make sure that you're fully supinating your wrists at
the top of every bicep exercise.
Providing that your mobility in your wrist allows you to, you want to make sure you take
advantage of that because you're not only going to get a stronger contraction, but you're
going to allow the long head to do the work for you.
It's a better supinator of the wrist because of its alignment and positioning than the
short head.
What you can do is, make sure no matter what exercise you're doing, you're really squeezing
and supinating at the top.
You can see as I do that, if I just do a contraction to here that's how much I get.
If I go a little bit more and supinate a little bit more you can see that the peak stands
up even more.
Again, you do it here, this is a contraction.
I continue, I continue, I continue, I continue; I could literally see it raise up further
and further.
So you want to make sure that – if your wrist mobility allows you to – don’t'
ever shy away from that really, really strong contraction at the top by ensuring that you're
fully supinated at the top.
On the fourth point here we actually have to look back at that anatomy again.
If you remember, that long head tendon actually crosses the shoulder joint.
It ran over the shoulder joint which means it has an action and involvement with the
shoulder that the short head does not.
So if we want to actually preferentially hit the long head of the bicep, we want to find
exercise that will involve the shoulder and place it into a bit more stretched position
so we can get a stronger contraction from the long head.
We can do that by placing our shoulder here into extension back behind our body.
You can automatically see it again; the tension that starts to happen here in the long head.
So we can do this with – as you could probably imagine – you could see here and incline
curl.
Obviously the setup of this exercise positions us perfectly for our arm to be back behind
our body.
Something maybe not so obvious, something like a drag curl.
Drag curls are great for hitting the long head.
They're great for allowing us to reach that peak contraction, they're great for allowing
us to keep the wrists in that bent back position and again, you can see with our arm's positioned
behind our body, it hits this in a perfect way based on the anatomy that we just discussed.
Alternatively if you wanted to hit the short head, if you were trying to work on the beefiness
here in the bicep then you would want to do the opposite.
You would want to place the arm into a position where your elbows are out more in front of
your body to minimize the long head.
You could do that, obviously, with preacher curls.
You could that with spider curls.
So you have options there, too.
If we're talking about bicep peak then you want to stick to the longhead adjustments
that I've already covered.
Finally, tip number five is one you've probably actually heard many times before.
I can tell you, it's actually not bro science.
People will tell you if you want to get your biceps to stand up taller then you want to
work your brachialis because your brachialis, when built and developed, will actually push
up on your bicep and make it more prominent.
Yeah, it's actually true.
I'm actually going to break out a little bonus marker here to show you why that is.
You can see that right above the tricep, if this is a tricep right here, above the tricep
you have this space right in through here which represents the brachialis.
So inside here, again, pushing up from the lateral side you can see when this muscle
is developed we're going to actually push up on the long head a little bit more because
it lays underneath that muscle.
Obviously, I'm showing it here on the outside, but it lays underneath.
So how do we hit that?
We hit that when our hands and our wrists are in a neutral position.
So anytime we're doing exercises like hammer curls here you can see that would cause your
brachialis to be doing most of the work.
It's primarily a bicep, or elbow flexor.
It's not a supinator.
Again, keeping it in neutral position is the perfect way to target this muscle.
All right, so there you have it guys.
As you can see, arm training is not all about just picking things up and putting them down.
There's actually a little bit of a science behind how you're supposed to do it.
Especially if you want to get more from it.
I actually understand the science, guys.
I've actually put together a complete, six week arm training program called Ultimate
Arms, but guess what?
You guys know we train athletes here.
We don’t just do arms and nothing else.
There's plenty of leg training, shoulders, back, chest; everything you're supposed to
hit, we hit in that program.
I designed it so we can preferentially make sure that you're going to add size to your
arms in just six weeks.
That program is available over at ATHLEANX.com.
In the meantime, if you've found this video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up
below.
Let me know – I know you like the muscle marker – if you want me to break it out
in other ways just let me know below and I'll do my best to cover it, all right?
So I'll be back here again in just a few days.
See you!