What s up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx.com. So, if I had to limit you to just one exercise
to build bigger arms and your choice was a pull up as shown here. I m going to let
you see it from every angle front and back or a chin-up, as shown here again,
front and back. Which one of them would you do if you wanted to build bigger arms? As always, guys
are going to do what we do here are going to put the science back in strength and going to break
out a muscle marker to help us to make the right decision. Now, I'm going to start with one of the
exercises. Which one should we do, Jesse? Chin-ups!
Chin-ups. Okay, with the chin-up guys, we re talking about that underhand grip
variation where you pull yourself up to the bar. Well, what do we get instantly? We know that we
get better bicep activation, right? Because if I take my arm just like this and I turn this form
over into the supinated position, you can see the biceps work just by doing that. So, we know we're
going to get better engagement of the biceps for doing that. But before you rush and say,
well, there's the one, that's the one that's going to build the bigger biceps, better arms,
here we go. Hold on a second because we don't just do this, in order to get the chin-up into
position, we have to do this too. You can see that when I bring my arm
into this position, I instantly do something else. I get a better activation of the lats.
The reason for that is that I'm getting more of a stretch placed on the lats by taking the two
attachment points further away from each other. This can tend to give people better recruitment
of the lats and actually, sometimes, dominate the contribution of the biceps. How do we fix
that? If we're going to do an underhand chin-up we want to make sure that we give ourselves a
chance to actually curl ourselves up to the bar as opposed to just pulling ourselves
directly up. When you pull yourself directly up you re going to favor more of the lats.
If you want to use this as an arm builder, you're going to want to do this instead.
You pretend like you're curling your body to the bar the same way that you would curl a bar
up to your body in a traditional barbell curl. And when we do that, you can see that we get
better activation and recruitment of the biceps, which turns us into a tremendous biceps builder.
But we're not done yet, and I haven't even used the muscle marker yet because there's another
muscle in your arm that you're going to want to build up if you want to have bigger arms.
And no, it's not the triceps, it doesn't work the triceps. We're talking about
this muscle right here, and it's the brachialis. You can see that when I go like this and I pull
my arm in as I'm pulling up into a pull up, you can see that this muscle here pops out.
That is what the muscle marker here is for. You can see right in this area here, right?
That muscle in there, which crosses the elbow, is called the brachialis. That is going to give us a
lot of width on the arm, which is going to fill up those shirtsleeves, making it a tremendous
arm builder. But you have to do this right too. You don't do a typical wide grip pull up.
Instead, what you do is you want to narrow up that grip because you can see if the brachialis
is a flexor of the elbow and my arms are wide like that and I pull down, I only get a limited
amount of flexion at the elbow. But if I were to go narrower, look at how much more flexion I get
in the elbow. Therefore, the narrow grip is going to set us up for more success in terms of building
the brachialis. Now how do we pull up to the bar? That matters too. You don't want to close down and
go all the way up tight to the bar when you do this if it s your brachialis is that you want
to build. You want to maintain a little bit of distance so you could keep this 90 degree angle
because you can see once again that when I come in here in this position and I have my
brachialis engaged, if I were to go and continue to pull it close, close down this angle, I start
to lose some of that activation, right? I got good activation there and as I get
a little bit closer, I lose it. You want to maintain that distance relationship from the bar
if you want to get the brachialis to be built up bigger and stronger. So, what's the answer? Well,
the answer is, good thing we have to choose one thing, the answer is both of them. How
would you do both of them, no matter what split your following right now? If you're following a
bro split, I would consider the brachialis exercise to be more of the pull up. Okay,
and that would go on our back day, and I consider the chin-up to be the better bicep exercise if
you performed it the way that I showed you and that would sort of go on bicep or arm day.
Now, if we're doing a traditional pull workout, then of course you can put them either in
alternating workouts to one day you're working the chin-up, and the next time you do your workout,
you're working the pull up. Or you can actually use them together in the same workout, with one
being the focus of the strength lift, meaning, let's say, a weighted pull up. And then you use
your chin-up as a higher rep accessory exercise provided you actually can bang out quite a few
reps with chin-ups. You can actually use a band if needed for some assistance there.
Or you can certainly fit this in in a total body workout scheme where you're doing this
every single time you're training, either the pull up or the chin-up. Again optimally
kind of waiting there so you can help with that progressive overload to build either
of those muscles you're trying to grow. The fact is, guys, both of them are great
exercises. How you do what you do always matters. Now you know how to do that. If you're looking for
a complete plan, guys head over to Athleanx.com, we have all of our plans available to you,
including our meal plan, everything laid out step by step. If you found the video helpful,
make sure you leave your comments and thumbs up below. Which exercise do you prefer and why?
Leave that in the Comments below. And also, if you haven t done so, click Subscribe and turn on your
Notifications so you never miss a new video when we put one out. All right guys see you soon.