What's up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere. Athleanx.com. If you've got ten minutes then you've got plenty
of time to get this bicep workout in. You see, I'm going to give you two options that you cold
do either at home or at the gym that are going to destroy your biceps in ten minutes flat. You see,
I talk about it all the time, you can either train hard or you can train long but you can't
do both. If we train in some of that workout length that maybe you're accustomed to for a lot
more intensity, you're going to feel first-hand exactly why it's possible to build muscle in a
short period of time. So with that being said, let's start breaking down the lighter version
of the workout, and by no means does that mean easier. All right, so when we're talking about a
lighter workout here, remember, first of all this is relative. It doesn't mean necessarily light,
it means lighter than the heavier version of the workout we're going to show you later. And vice
versa when we're talking about the heavier one, it doesn't mean absolutely heavy where we would
actually be training for strength if we got to the low rep ranges with more rest time. We're
talking about heavier than the lighter workout. Both of them, however, are geared at hypertrophy
and muscle growth. And right here when we target the biceps, one of the best ways to
do it was with a single band. Now I know what you're saying, band workouts are easy, maybe,
until you try this one. The fact is we're going to start here with a single exercise and you're going
to perform it for 45 seconds on and 15 seconds off. Now the goal would be to be able to perform
it nonstop without resting through the duration of the 45 seconds. If you had to stop, you stop
briefly, and you get right back into it again and you keep going. Because what we're trying to do
here is go after a metabolic fatigue. We're trying to use metabolic stimulus as a way to create
muscle growth. And if we keep pushing ourselves through that burn we're going to get there faster.
But we don't just have one exercise here, we take that first exercise for 45 on and 15 off,
and we repeat it for a total of two times. That means two minutes for the first exercise. We then
go and we repeat four other exercises in the same fashion. So what do the exercises look like? Well,
we start with this one here and this is a no money banded curl. And what the advantage is the band
supply here, well it's not just the fact that we can resist ourselves through flection of the
elbow through the curl itself, but we can also pull apart. And you can see as we pull the band
apart we're getting resisted external rotation. So we're not just getting biceps focused here,
we're getting biceps with external rotation in the rotator cuff. Which is actually an
extremely powerful combo when you realize that the biceps tend to be an integral part of the
shoulder joint itself gets additional benefit from having the balance of the rotator cuff to
keep that shoulder in good health. 45 seconds on, 15 seconds off, two rounds. From here we
move on to the second exercise, and now this is the banded drag curl. We shorten the moment arm,
we bring the elbows back, we take our hands, we bring them closer to our body,
and we curl from this position, which shifts the focus actually to the long head of the bicep,
the outside portion, which is what's responsible more for that bicep's peak. And you could see I'm
just trying to drag my hands up my torso as much as I can, allowing the elbow bend, the flection
part that attacks the biceps to happen mostly back behind my body. You should feel a tight
contraction as you get as high as you possibly can. From here you lower the band back down,
repeat, again 45 seconds on, and 15 seconds off. We next move on to the third exercise here,
which is called the step back curl. And for this, all I have to do is anchor the band to anything
that's a little bit higher than me. Ideally, if you have a pull-up bar in your doorway, this would
work perfectly. With the band anchored in place, I grab onto it, I step back to get good tension,
and I curl. But I'm not done yet. From here now I have to take a giant step backwards. And what
that does is it places an additional isometric overload to maintain that elbow flection in that
position through the duration of the step back when I'm getting more tension here on the band,
and then come back in and repeat it again. Now the extra benefit here is the fact that I'm getting my
biceps into a state of complete contraction. I've got elbow flection, I've got supination, and I've
got that all important third component that we oftentimes overlook, which is shoulder flection.
So this set-up sets us into the position for having that complete bicep contraction. Remember,
45 seconds on, 15 seconds off. Again, two rounds of this. We move on to the fourth exercise here
in the workout, and this is the cross body banded hammer curl. So the slight positioning difference
here is instead of being in the neutral position that you would normally perform a hammer curl out
of, we go into a fully pronated position. And we know that if we go into a pronated position,
we actually activate the brachialis a little bit more than if we do it from that mid-position. Now,
why is that a benefit? Well, there's two reasons. Number one: we know that the brachialis is the
muscle that we want to develop if we want to have a fully developed upper arm as it
lies underneath the biceps. But more importantly, think about where this is in this workout. This
is the fourth exercise in. You're already likely burning and cursing my name out. We got to offset
that bicep load a little bit and give it a little bit of a break. At a key moment in the workout,
and this is why this is placed in here perfectly at this time. Remember, as always, once again,
the 45 on, 15 off, two rounds. And then we wrap up our workout here in this final two minute stretch.
This one reserved for the leaning stretch curl. And to perform this you want to angle our body
forward with our biceps facing almost directly down towards the ground. This is going to place
an enormous stretch in the biceps because we have our arms here back into extension behind our body
as opposed to, remember we talked about, flection of the shoulder. Now from here we want to try
to drive our hands down towards the ground and straight forward. They should almost be facing
directly forward if you've done this properly. At that point, you should feel a pretty intense
bicep contraction, but most importantly, you're taking advantage of that stretch reflex. You have
an opportunity here to get a strong contraction in the fifth spot of the workout because you had
the added stretch reflex that's going to be used to your advantage. Make sure you take advantage
of it if you want to get through the remainder of this workout. And with that, in just ten minutes,
you've managed to torture your biceps with a single band, probably in the comfort of your
own home. And more importantly, you've convinced yourself that good things can happen if you're
willing to put the work in. Let's say you want to go the other route, you want to go a little
bit heavier, but you still just had those ten minutes. Well, in that case, all you need is a
single pair of dumbbells, and you do this instead. If the option you chose was to train a little
bit heavier, then the goal should be a little bit different. The focus is not using metabolic stress
to drive hypertrophy muscle growth. The goal here is to use tension overload as well as eccentric
overload to create that stimulus for growth. And we could do that, like I said, with a single pair
of dumbbells. And in some cases, here in the last exercise, a single one of those dumbbells from
that pair. But what we start with is the following exercise, and it is the dumbbell straight bar
curl. So we're going to mimic a straight bar by placing those dumbbells end to end like you see me
doing here. What that does, is it demands that we move them at the same pace, which actually exposes
any muscle imbalances you might have between the right and left side. But more importantly,
it just gets us into simulating the movement of the bar, as opposed to two independent dumbbells,
which as you're going to see here in a minute, is going to actually become a little bit easier for
you when we need it the most. You do this for a minute. If we could get through the entire minute,
you've done your job. If you can't and you have to rest, just like we did in the light version
of the workout, you would take a momentary rest pause, get right back into it, and finish out the
entire minute. Now for these types of exercises, however, because the load is higher we're going to
get a one minute rest period. So we've got a one minute work period, one minute rest period. And
as you can see, the workout is structured with additional exercises, all the way down until we
get towards the end, where I have a special surprise. But that's not here yet. The next
exercise up is what we need to discuss, and that is the dumbbell drag curl. So for the drag curl,
just like we did with the banded drag curl, the goal is to try to hit the long head of the
biceps by bringing those dumbbells in closer to your torso, getting the elbows back behind you,
and simply trying to ride those dumbbells up the front of your body as tight as you possibly can.
You can see the contraction here on that outer portion of the biceps. You can feel the intensity
of the contraction if you're doing it right. The fact is, in the second spot here actually is
beneficial because it's offloading some of the tension that was on the biceps from the first
exercise by the change in the moment arm to allow you to continue to do this ideally without rest.
But this is only going to last you for a minute because we're going right back to the curl again,
as you can see here in exercise number three, this time to the dumbbell standing alternating
curl. So now how is this going to be possible if we already fatigue the biceps through the first
two exercises? Well, the big difference here is that you're able to move a lot more weight when
you move them individually than when you move them together. And a lot of it has to do with
your ability to control your torso via your core strength. When you move two dumbbells up together,
let's say they weigh 50 pounds apiece, your body's trying to stabilize 100 pounds moving in this
direction. So you have to have a stronger core contraction and more stability to do that. In the
case of a single alternating dumbbell curl, you're only having to do half of that. Not to mention
you can actually lean into the arm and actually create a little bit more leverage for the working
arm that makes this exercise possible, even though it's put in that third spot. And we continue here,
again, after a two minute time period to go to our fourth exercise, which is the cross body dumbbell
hammer curl. And once again, just like we did in the banded version here, we're going fully
pronated to force that brachialis to do more of the work. You can see that even as we crank out
rep after rep. It would feel like it would be very difficult here. But we're not just relying
solely on the biceps. We have the help it needs in the brachialis. We want to make sure that we
use it to get the job done. And this brings us to the ninth minute of the workout here,
right when your biceps are ready to pop, we kind of stick the final dagger into them with this
bicep waiter curl. And the water curl's job is to actually take the forearms that probably want to
kick in at this point, and dominate the movement, say no, you can't. You're going to stay out of
this thing and let the biceps finish this off. So you get into this wrist extension position to
support the dumbbell where the top of the dumbbell basically stays level with the ceiling that you're
curling in for the duration of the exercise. Now this was only being done for 45 seconds,
but it doesn't make it any easier. Your goal is to simply lift that dumbbell straight up to the
ceiling by getting those wrists taken out of it to prevent the forearms from kicking in too much.
If we can make it through the entire 45 seconds here, you get a brief 45 second rest before we
hit our last combination here, and this is our burnout. I had mentioned this special surprise,
the goal here is to try to make it through the entire minute without resting, or at least doing
some type of contraction. Because you got an option here, you either start with holding this
isometric contraction in the midrange of the bicep curl, which by the way, is the most difficult
portion of the curl. You hold it there as long as you possibly can. Now at this point in the game,
it's likely you may not be able to hold it for the entire time. But it doesn't mean that you
stop. You can actually try to force the eccentric overload of this exercise, and that's being done
by just simply delaying and slowing down the straightening out of your arms as they start
to become overcome by the weight of the dumbbells in your hands. Don't let them just drop. Slow it
down with every bit of effort you have remaining. If you make it through the end of the minute here,
it's a job well done, and believe me, you've earned it. And once again, in ten minutes now,
you've got that workout here laid out in front of you step-by-step with just that single pair
of dumbbells that's going to get the job done as well. It doesn't matter which path you choose,
different stresses all leading to the same goal of more bicep growth, more hypertrophy. Remember
guys, it doesn't mean that you have to train long in order to get results. All you have to do is
be willing to train hard and you can train in a lot of that workout length if you're willing to
up the intensity level at which you train with. If you're looking for a program that encourages
that and shows you how to do it step-by-step, you can head to Athleanx.com right now and find the
program that's best suited to your current goals. In the meantime, if you found this video helpful,
if you like series, let me know below what else you want to see. I'll do my best to do
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