What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today I’m going to tell you how to get your biceps to start growing a lot faster.
It doesn’t necessarily involve a lot of this.
I know you guys know I’m a fan of heavy barbell curls and utilizing a cheat curl to
overload the eccentric, but we know that’s only one mechanism of creating overload.
We know that there are a lot of other ways to do that.
What I’m going to tell you here is, you’re going to want to trade in that bar for this
bar if you’re looking for faster gains.
I’m going to tell you the reason for that, because there is a very distinct reason for
that, but it’s going to require that you don’t just do a chin-up because there are
some issues with a chin-up – my favorite exercise – when it comes to bicep development.
There’s a way to change the chin-up if you want to enhance or speed up that bicep development
and it requires a few modifications.
So, here’s what we do.
The first thing is, obviously, with a chin-up we’re going with an underhand grip.
But we need to look at how wide that grip needs to be and, more importantly, how wide
the grip is in relation to the elbows.
Anatomically we have something called the ‘carrying angle of the elbow’.
The carrying angle is in place to allow us to carry something at our sides and not interfere
with the locomotion of the legs.
So, we know that the angle, if you look at the upper arm, comes down and veers a little
bit to the outside.
So, if we have something in our hands it wouldn’t hit the legs, as I’ve said.
Well, when we curl our arm up when we train our biceps and bring our elbow into flexion
here, the same thing happens here.
The arm doesn’t go straight up, or even inward.
It goes a little bit to the outside of the shoulder.
So, what we want to do is be able to mimic that so we can maximally target the biceps.
So, when we get to the bar and take an underhand grip, we want to make sure the elbows are
more inward in relation to the hands.
Hands outside the elbows.
We can’t manipulate this.
Once we grab a bar it’s fixed.
We can’t change that.
If we had a dumbbell, we could change a dumbbell in space as we curl it, but here we can’t.
So, we have to set it up that way.
The next thing we want to do is, we’ve talked about this tip before, of involving the biceps
more by deactivating the forearms.
We can do that by bending back the wrists a little bit.
Now, be careful when you do this.
You want to make sure you’re not just gripping the outer fingers because that could lead
to some medial elbow pain that we’ve talked about before.
So, you want to grip the bar, you just rotate backward.
Just like this.
Grip it in the palm, grip it in the palm, rotate backward, your hands are outside your
elbows.
Now as you start to curl, this is where all the difference is made.
When I curl up to the top here you don’t want to collapse yourself down.
People talk about getting the chin over the bar, but what that’s really referencing
is your chin higher than the bar.
Not necessarily over the bar this was because when you close down that angle you take a
lot of the stress off the bicep and that’s something that’s going to take away from
the effectiveness of what we’re trying to do here.
We know if I took a dumbbell and curled it all the way to the top, all the way to where
it was touching my shoulder here, I could stay here for a hell of a lot longer than
I could if I backed it off 10 or 20 degrees, kept more of an angle here.
And therefore, more stress from the force of gravity downward onto that dumbbell, onto
my biceps, which is what we’re trying to get.
So why do we do the same thing here?
We want to keep that angle open.
So, as we come up to the top, we keep the distance.
That distance is key.
That distance makes a huge difference in what we’re going to get from this exercise.
So not closing down but keeping that distance.
The fourth thing I do is start to lean my body back a little bit because the motion
is not even straight up and down, but it’s this.
Up, and towards it.
Lean back a little bit, come up, and toward it, never closing that angle down anymore
than that.
But you’re basically curling your body.
If had a curl bar down here I’d be going in an arc.
If I’m taking my body here with my fixed hands, I have to arc my body.
So, it looks like this.
I’m down, in here, up, I come a little bit closer.
Down and away, up and closer.
Sown and away, up and closer.
Just like that.
You can see it’s putting a number on those biceps.
Now why does this work so well?
We talked about an alternative mechanism to overload.
We talked about eccentric muscle damage being one of those options, but we also talked about
progressive overload.
You’ll be shocked at how much this will overload your biceps in a novel, and unique
way because if you’re used to just curling dumbbells or curling a barbell, you’re likely
not even getting as much stress on your biceps as this is going to do.
If you weight 180lbs, some of it’s going to be unweighted by your lats.
We know that, but a great deal of it is going to be born by the biceps, especially after
you make these modifications.
That might equate to 120lb load and you’re used to curling 100lbs on a curl but are unable
to curl a 120lb weight.
It’s the ability to manipulate your bodyweight in space here that allows you to work with
those strength curves and how they adjust along the path of this exercise that will
allow you to start performing this with a heavier load.
And therefore start to see results you haven’t seen from doing the other exercises that don’t
involve this.
The final point I’ll make on this is, as a progressively overloaded exercise, what
you would do is add weight when able.
If you can do 10 or 12 or 14 of these without a challenge, it’s time to start adding more
weight.
You guys know I’m a big fan of this, even working up to 3 plates on a weighted chin.
The fact of the matter is, you need to make sure you’re always challenging yourself.
But when you make these modifications, I promise you, you’re going to see faster gains in
your biceps than you ever have before.
If you’ve found this video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up below.
Let me know what else you want me to cover and I’ll do my best to do that for you.
If you’re looking for step by step plans that, at times, we incorporate bodyweight
as a resistance option because we know it’s the best option for what we’re trying to
accomplish.
We work them all in with all our barbell and dumbbell exercises as well.
They’re all over at ATHLEANX.com.
In the meantime, if you haven’t already, please subscribe and turn on your notifications
so you never miss a video when we put one out.
All right, guys.
Talk to you again soon.