Just 6 days away from the official day of summer in a lot of parts of the world.
My question to you is, are those biceps going to be ready to show off in those short sleeved
shirts?
Let's see.
Let's try and get you there, starting with today's workout.
[Music intro]
What's up guys?
Jeff Cavaliere at AthleanX.com.
Here we are as I mentioned in the open, a bicep workout.
Now I know you guys have asked me for a while.
Let's see another straight hard workout we can use.
I figure what better time than now to get you ready for that warm weather, because again,
here in the States, the 21st the first official day of summer.
You are going to have to have those short-sleeved shirts and you are going to have to look good
in them.
What I want to do is get you started the right way with ATHLENA-X Training.
When I say that, guys, I don't just say working out.
I say training, because I want to train with purpose.
I am going to give you exercises that take you from where you start, to where you should
be better, to where you should be the best.
That's what this is all about, progressing you and also doing it in a way that makes
sense.
Adding some science behind what we do.
I want to see by the end of this video if you agree that we have taken you through,
and progressively shown you a way to train, thumb it up and tell me that you have because
I want you to see that this is what happens when you apply some science to your training.
Don't just do concentration curls, and preacher curls and everything else that you read in
the magazines all the time, or that you just see over and over again.
We start our workout here today with 21 curls.
Now you are going to say, I have done 21s before, I know what they are.
Not this way.
We are going to take advantage of the different branches of motion inside an actual contraction.
So we are going to have our peak contraction, our stretch position, our mid-range position.
We are going to combine them all into one set.
We are going to start here, up by the bench, sitting up with our incline bench already
set up for us.
We are going to do a regular, mid-range curl.
Meaning that most of the tension in that muscle is occurring in the mid-range of that curl.
You know that this is peak tension here, so the biceps is working hardest in the middle
of that curl.
OK?
We are going to do 7 of those.
Then when we want to go to a stretch position and get a little more blood flowing there,
and also take advantage of the stretch reflex, all we have to do is lean back into the already
set-up incline curl, and then curl up from here.
So now we have stretch reflex on the bottom.
OK?
A little bit of a straight bounce off the bottom, take advantage of that.
Now, the peak contraction is down here, overcoming that stretch.
That is why we just shifted from that mid-range, down to the contracted.
The last one we want to do is the contracted, and all we have to do is face inward on the
incline bench, put our feet back, hang our arms down in front of us.
It is a modified field curl position for those guys that have done this already.
What we are going to do is curl straight up.
Now, it is not that hard down here.
It is the hardest at the very top which is the peak contracted position of the bicep.
So again down, then all the way up, down, then all the way up.
7 reps.
[Repeats the motions]
Ok you have 3 sets of the mid-range contracted, all in one set, the 21 curl.
Now I am going to take you over here to our regular straight bar.
Now one thing you'll notice guys, is there is not a lot of options when it comes to strength
training in terms of the overall movement.
The movement is probably going to be some variation of a curl, because the movement
at that joint is either going to be the flexion of the elbow, the supination of the wrist
or a little bit of flexion at the shoulder.
We talked about this before.
So it is always going to look like a variation of a curl, but we do with the curl is what
makes the most difference, when we come to building muscle.
So here I have a straight bar set-up.
There is 2 things I want to point out.
One is I have a 25 lbs on this side, the other I have 15 lbs over here.
So we call these the scale of justice curls.
I have 2 scales, I have to slow them down and move them at the same speed.
What that forces me to do is put some mind into the muscle.
Put some brain into the biceps and make sure that I can contract this thing at a pace under
my control so that I am forcing myself to have a realization of what I am trying to
do.
Here, I think that is one of the missing links for people.
They don't curl with the muscle.
They just move away from point a to point b an actually let everything else get involved.
So what we do is set it up.
I have the heavier side on the right.
It doesn't matter to me, because I have to make sure I curl this thing up at the same
pace, and down and level.
What I purposefully do, if you notice the second thing I was going to point out, is
that there are no collars at the end of this bar.
I don't use collars because I want to force myself to use this weight in the right way.
If it is wrong, you know they are going to fall out and you are going to know that you
are doing it wrong.
If you have collars on there I have no way of knowing.
OK?
So you are going to move your weight evenly, and your curls, 3 sets of Scale of Justice
curls.
Next we move on to another variation from exercises we have done in the past: the No
Money Curl.
Now what is the advantage of the No Money Curl?
We can do Straight Advantage or No Money Curl.
That's OK.
But the No Money Curl gets our biceps to work in concert with our rotator cuffs, to externally
rotate the shoulders.
Guys that work out for a long time are likely to have internally rotated shoulders, rounded.
If you watch me from the side I look like this.
We have some opportunities outside of the rotator cuff work, to help correct that imbalance.
This is one of them.
Now we are going to make it a No Money Chin-up.
So all I have to do is position myself in the middle of the bar, put my hands to the
outside.
So now my elbows are basically in, and externally rotated under the shoulder.
Here and here- Wide.
Bring the elbows in, and curl up.
Now for those guys that are going to this for the aesthetics of it, the wider your hands,
the more narrow your elbows, the more the inner part of the biceps you are going to
work and vice versa.
Hands in, elbows out you work more outside the bicep; hands out elbows in you are going
to work more the underside of the bicep, the inside part.
3 sets of those.
Last we always finish exercises in ATHLEAN-X, when we can, with burn-out variations.
What burn-outs do is they take muscles that have been predominantly trained for fast-twitch,
the 12 rep range, and we force them to a little more for muscle endurance.
What that does is it usually gets them to respond, because A, it is a new stimulus for
that muscle and B, it helps to bring more blood to the muscle in the end.
I have been doing this since I was a little kid.
I feel like it has contributed definitely, along with eating correctly, to good vascularity,
muscle definition, the whole thing.
So what we do here is a Tubing Burn-Out Curl.
I am going to go for about 50 of these.
Shoulder to back, and we just rep them out.
[Exercises]
Again, what I am doing here is I am going for as many reps as I can get until I just
can't move this tubing even an inch.
I don't know how many I am at at this point, but I can tell you my shoulders and my biceps
are ready to pop.
This once easy band is now much more difficult to move.
If you think you can't get anymore, you have got to go for 5 more.
[Exercises]
That's the Tubing Burn-Out Curl.
Again, it is a much different experience than any of the other exercises because you are
used to using a lot of weight, heavier weight, that limits you to do a much lower rep range.
Guys, what do they say?
"Suns out, guns out" any of those corny phrases.
The point here is, whatever your motivation is, you have to train, but you have to train
effectively.
You have to put a little bit of science behind what you do, because if you are not, then
you are just working out.
As I said, training is a whole different thing.
Training is working out with a purpose.
That is what ATHLEAN-X is all about.
Don't limit yourself to just your biceps guys.
Get everything looking right in time for summer by coming over to Athleanx.com, grabbing the
ATHLEAN-X Training System.
Get in on the workout that is changing guys physiques across the world, getting athletes
in the best shape of their lives, and taking current pro-athletes to all new levels.
Go to Athleanx.com and grab your training program.
I will see you back here next week.
Until then, get this bicep curl working for you
and I will see you in 7 days and it will be summer by then.
See you then.