What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
We start this video with a pop quiz utilizing Jessie.
Jessie is going to perform an incline dumbbell bench press.
You are going to watch and see if you can spot what Jessie does wrong.
Okay, Jessie?
The floor is yours.
What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
There you have it.
The big reveal, why Jessie actually stares into the camera.
Now the fact of the matter is he's getting better.
He's getting more comfortable in front of the camera.
I think we could chock it up to being uncomfortable, but he's also getting more comfortable in
his own skin because you have seen him now, or are starting to see him, transform into
a bigger version of himself.
And his confidence is growing because of that.
Today we're hitting the biceps and we're going to do the Hard Gainer Edition and I'm going
to throw at you a lot of the tips that I use.
Not just with Hard Gainers, but with anybody trying, or struggling to build bigger biceps
and to help them to try to get better at doing that.
So it starts right here with one of the concepts I've been talking about numerous times in
the Hard Gainer series with Jessie.
That is activation seems to be one of the problems.
Being able to activate a muscle, and getting it to contract under your own will, your own
control.
So here's what we start with.
If you have a hard time – even if you're not sure if you're having a hard time with
this – try this with us, okay?
The first thing you need to do is you need to try to put the bicep through the different
elements of its full contraction.
We know that the first thing it does is it bends the elbow up and down.
It flexes the elbow.
So what we do is, we're just going to bend the elbow in a hammer curl position and you
try to squeeze as hard as you can to see if you can feel any discomfort here.
That's the goal.
We're actually going for that, actually, that strong of a contraction to cause discomfort.
The next thing is you supinate at the forearm here.
Now you can start to feel a little bit more discomfort in there, right?
I wasn't joking when I was talking about this kid's arms, right?
So you can feel that?
Now at the top you should already be able to start to feel a little bit of discomfort.
Then we just raise it because we know that the bicep will also flex the shoulder.
When you get up here I can feel discomfort in here.
It actually hurts, right?
I can't hold it for all that long.
If you're not getting that discomfort you need to practice this more.
You could do this on non-bicep days if you want to just get a better mind-muscle contraction
here.
Step 1.
Step 2: when we go to our dumbbell work, how you contract during the dumbbell work is going
to make all the difference in the results that you see.
There's a lot of back and forth on how that's actually done.
There's really only one way.
This is why it works.
Jessie is going to grab this dumbbell.
Now we know that we just went through the components of the bicep contraction.
The elbow flexion, supination, and even a little bit of shoulder flexion.
The most important thing are the first two, obviously, and we want to make sure that we're
overloading both the flexion of the elbow, and we're overloading the supination.
You can stand here and preset the dumbbells here, but you're not really doing what I'm
going to show you here, which is much more beneficial.
That is, you're going to slide the dumbbell to one end of your hand.
Jessie's got it all the way up against the top part of his hand – his thumb and his
forefinger – so that the dumbbell, when he holds it this way, is weighted downward.
It wants to fall down because he's holding it in the top part and it wants to fall down.
So what's the only way he's going to straighten this dumbbell to get back to flat?
He's got to supinate.
So he's got to supinate.
So now we've just overloaded supination, which is one of the major components of bicep contraction
and you have to have it.
A lot of hard gainers will miss the contraction entirely, but now they're not going to miss
anymore of these individual components.
So now you start with your dumbbell down at your side.
This applies to all different variations of dumbbells curls.
Whether it be incline, whether it be standing dumbbell curls.
And as he curls up, he curls, he's flexing, he's overloading that, and he's overloading
supination, and he curls all the way up.
Now when he gets to the top here you don’t want to rest the dumbbell over here because
that takes all the tension off the bicep.
So you keep the tension in the bicep to about that much – turn a little bit – that much
bend, and then I said you can even just raise the elbow just a little bit at the top there
as you're contracting, right here, to get that little, added component of shoulder flexion.
It doesn’t have to be much.
Just curl, curl, and then just to there, and lift up.
Come down.
Do a couple reps.
Up, curl, overload, and just a little lift.
Good.
That's it.
Down.
Minimal lift.
Up, curl, there, little lift.
Right there.
Boom.
That's it.
You feel the contraction all the way down.
So no matter what you're doing those have to be there.
The activation has to be there and how you actually curl has to be proper.
Now the next component is overloading because, again, we still need to get you stronger.
But we have to do the exercises that are going to allow you to get stronger and allow you
to still overload the exercises right.
For me, growing up, one of the only things I was doing for a long period of time – because
I wasn't lifting weights – was bodyweight stuff.
I was doing chin-ups.
Lots of chin-ups.
The chin-up is one of the best exercises for overloading the biceps.
What we want to do, there's a couple things in particular.
Jessie, get up on the bar.
When you do your chin-ups you can't pull all the way up to the top like that because he's
closed this down so much that there's nothing really, no work really being done by the biceps
here.
He's actually resting.
Oh, you've got some mice underneath your arms.
JESSIE: It's from the beard.
JEFF: Oh, the beard's growing out of his armpits now.
Good.
That's good.
I don’t want to hear about your grooming habits, Jessie.
So we go all the way to the top of the bar and he's maintained the work on the biceps
by just backing off to about 90 degrees as you see here.
Instantly you can feel that, right?
Now come down.
The next thing you do is your grip and how you actually grip the bar.
So we just talked about how you can manipulate the dumbbell.
If you are on the bar and you grip through your fourth and fifth finger – your two
smallest fingers – what you're doing is you're actually overloading and providing
some resistance for supination.
But if you have to squeeze, squeezing it is what will turn your hands into supination.
The other fingers can rest on top of the bar, but the squeeze and the effort is being put
through the fourth and the fifth finger.
That's going to give you a little bit of resisted isometric – because the bar won't let your
hands actually turn through it – but supination.
So you'll feel that instantly.
So go back up to the bar.
Now you're going to perform your chin-ups that way.
So you're squeezing through your fourth and fifth fingers, you come up, you've maxed out
at the top so you're not taking the tension off the biceps, and you do your reps that
way.
You keep going all the way to failure.
The last component – I told you this, not just about creating the overload – then
it's taking it through failure.
So as soon as you go here and do an eccentric only rep.
So you either step yourself up to the bar once you fail, or you jump yourself up to
the bar.
So either way.
Go ahead.
So let's say you've just failed.
Now you're down, and you're just fighting it down.
Fighting, fighting, fighting, fighting, and fighting.
The same reason, all the way through the elbows like that, the same way we did on the curls.
Now just show them the step up.
They're in a cage, they could just step up, step up, boom, boom, get in position.
He's already up at the top.
He doesn’t have to worry about the concentric and then he lets go, and then he comes down,
and he fights that all the way down.
So lots to work with here guys, as you can see.
Come up here, Jessie.
Give them a flex.
Okay, good.
That's enough.
He's actually – Jessie's doing a great job.
As I said, it's not just the exterior that's grown, but it's the interior, too.
The confidence grows as you start to look better, and I know the struggles that a hard
gainer faces.
I was there myself, guys.
The more muscle you build, the more confidence you get in yourself, and more importantly,
the more confidence you get in what you can achieve.
The greatest thing about lifting weights is that you prove to yourself you can change
your body in some pretty magnificent ways and by actually doing it through your own
blood, sweat, and tears, and hard work.
It's very, very empowering.
So guys, if you're in the same position as Jessie use him as a motivation to get yourself
out there.
Save the beard.
Leave it for him.
Get yourself out there and training hard.
If you're looking for a program that puts all these concepts into action and allows
you to go step by step, and make the same gains that Jessie is; head to ATHLEANX.com
and get our ATHLEANX training program.
Whatever else you want to see me cover here, let me know below and I'll do my best to do
that for you in the days and weeks ahead.
All right, guys.
See you soon.
JESSIE: Jeff, I really think you're just jealous of the beard at this point.
JEFF: For the record, I cannot grow a beard guys.
So I stopped a long time ago.
I'll save that for Jessie, too.
JESSIE: Your beard questions can be directed to me.
JEFF: No problem.