What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Are you a bicep non-responder?
In other words, you band away at your bicep workout, you never really feel them working
all that much, maybe other areas fatigue faster than the biceps do themselves so you don’t
get that much out of your training, and more importantly you don’t see the results that
you think you should from all the time you spent training them.
Well, I can tell you this: it's not about how much time you spend training them, it's
the effort and the quality of your training that matters most.
So when it comes to the biceps it takes a little bit of an understanding about what
they do so that you stop avoiding 50% of the function of what they do.
At least in terms of overloading that function.
If you look at the biceps, yeah, they bend at the elbow.
We know that.
They flex the elbow here, they close down this joint; however you want to talk about
it that is a function of the bicep.
But that's not it because I can take my elbow joint, flex it all the way with the pronated
position here of my hand and I don’t have a complete contraction of my biceps.
Even though they are contracting, it doesn’t become complete until I supinate.
So they will supinate the forearm because of the biceps attachment to the radius and
our forearm, and it's a very important component of a full bicep contraction.
But guess what?
It's one of the components – the 50% - that we never overload.
Remember, the key is to overload.
If you're not overloading all functions of a muscle then you're not going to see the
maximum development of that muscle.
So I kind of removed the excuses for you here in this video because I'm going to help you
to do it and I don’t care what you're going to use to train with, I'm going to show you
how.
If you decide you wanted to do bicep curls and you wanted to get more out of them – a
lot of guys will just take their bicep curls and do this.
Some of them won't even really worry about how they're turning, or whatever they're doing
with their wrists or forearm at all.
They just do a straight curl.
You can get more out of this by overloading the supination and you can't do it by just
gripping the dumbbell in the middle here.
Yeah, you can twist, but at this point you're actually taking the force away from the supination.
So what you do is, you grip the dumbbell all the way here at the end.
Put it between your thumb and your forefinger and let the other fingers just loosely grip
on.
But you'll see that it creates a sort of downhill slope of the dumbbell.
Well, as I'm curling back, if I want to get the dumbbell straight I'm going to have to
supinate and overcome the force that's pushing this thing and weighing this thing down because
of how uneven my grip is.
So I have to do that and when I do that I'm overloading the supination.
I'm going to get better results training the curl just by changing the position of my hand.
Maybe you want to train at home and you want to use bands and that's fine.
It doesn't mean – as we say all the time here at ATHLEANX – that the excuses begin
because you don’t have something, or you don’t have access to a piece of equipment.
That's BS.
You can do something with anything you have if you have the right understanding of what
you're doing.
So you take this band, instead of gripping it here, okay, which is right here in my palm
like that; you can influence the overload on supination by putting the thing between
your two fingers here.
Your middle finger and your pointer finger, and then letting it rest through the rest
of your palm here.
So this diagonal angle here, when I go to curl, now I have to overcome the supination
here.
I have to supinate in order to overcome and add more resistance to this band by doing
that.
You could see, just doing that creates more band resistance.
So of course, when I go back here to curl, as I'm curling I'm getting more resistance
here through supination.
Therefore, a stronger contraction, therefore better results in the long term.
Maybe you're at the gym and you use a machine.
So you're at the cable curl machine.
Again, another popular way that guys like to train their biceps.
A lot of times they'll just train it like this.
The same thing happens here.
You're not really overloading the supination component.
To do it you take advantage of this handle that a lot of us don’t even know how versatile
it really is.
It's not meant to just stay here in the middle, guys.
That's why it actually moves.
So what you do is, you put it all the way to the end, like that.
So a straight line.
Then you grab it from the outside in.
Now what have we done?
We've created an overload supination.
I can move the stack and lift this thing just by twisting the wrist and twisting the forearm
here into supination.
So when I go back to do my curls I'm actually loading up – not just an elbow flexion,
but a supination as well.
And you wouldn’t want to start these things – not really the cable so much as the dumbbell
– you wouldn't want to start turning when you get to the very top.
I see it all the time and I don’t understand why you're getting all the way to the top
and then turning.
There's no real resistance on that motion when your arms are already at the top of the
contraction.
What you want to do is start it as you're doing the curl so you're against gravity the
whole time and working on that supination so that, again, you're at least experiencing
overload.
So guys, we put the science back in strength here.
Not to confuse you, not to bore you, not to get to be a geek on you; but to help you to
get more out of every workout that you do.
If you're looking for a complete training program to get the most out of every workout,
then head to ATHLEANX.com, guys.
We put the science back in strength to do just that.
In the meantime, if you've found this video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up
below.
By the way, if you want to kid of get more work on your arms we have a program for that.
It's called Ultimate Arms.
It is a complete training program.
We never dismiss leg training, back training, shoulder training, chest training; we never
dismiss anything.
But our Ultimate Arms program influences the arms a little bit more to make sure, if you're
one of those guys that needs a little extra help there, that this program will do just
that, okay?
All of them are over at ATHLEANX.com.
All right, guys.
I'll be back here again in just a couple days.