What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
So, you’re having trouble building your biceps?
You’ve come to me, and my video.
I think I can help you.
I’m not really sure, but I think I can help you.
Guys, I’ve got to be honest with you here.
That’s a joke because honestly, when I was younger my biceps were my biggest trouble
spot.
I didn’t have big arms.
It was through my perseverance and wanting to build bigger biceps that I made a whole
hell of a lot of mistakes, but I ultimately wound up being able to build decent sized
arms because of that.
So, what I want to do is help you today.
I know why yours aren’t growing and I’m going to help you fix that.
First, when we get into the different aspects of training your biceps I like to think there
are mechanical things you’re doing wrong.
Literally, how you’re lifting the dumbbell, and when you’re twisting, and if you’re
raising your arm up or not to get complete bicep contraction.
I made a video on that, and I’m going to link that right here to show you what it looks
like.
I’m going to link it again at the end of the video because I want you to see that.
I cover five mechanical flaws that you’re making.
You’re going to want to see that.
Today I’m going to tell you the two things you’re probably doing wrong that are definitely
holding you back – beside your arms, again, I know because I’ve witnessed this myself,
first hand – is your training frequency.
Secondly, your lack of variation of bicep training techniques.
First of all, as far as training frequency goes, you have to understand that the biceps
are pretty limited in terms of their function.
They supinate the forearm like this.
You can see the bicep will activate just by doing that.
Most importantly they flex the elbow.
That’s their biggest driver and function, is to flex the elbow like this because of
their attachment from here, down.
They pull, they pull the elbow up.
They also have the ability to get a little bit of shoulder flexion because of the longhead’s
attachment up in the top here of the glenohumeral joint.
So, we can get a little bit of that, too.
Because of that, you have to realize that any time you’re bending your elbow in any
exercise you do, on your pull day, any back exercise, chin-ups, rows, inverted rows, one-armed
rows; anything you’re doing, you’re working your biceps.
Your biceps are an incredibly small muscle, believe it or not, only occupying a very small
portion of the anterior side of your arm.
Too much volume here, and too many times hitting them in a week is going to be too much.
A lot of times, guys, if you’re training a push-pull leg system, and you’re training
each function twice a week, if you throw any direct bicep work in on top of that you’re
truly hitting your biceps three times in that week and not giving them enough time to recuperate.
It’s not about protein synthesis every 48 hours.
It’s literally about giving that muscle group a chance to recover and get back to
being able to be stimulated again in a meaningful way.
Not just to coast through another half-assed workout, but in a meaningful way that leads
to progressive overload.
That is where we jump off into the second point.
When we’re talking about progressive overload, again, go back to the function of the biceps.
Their limitation in what they do.
We’re talking about a hinge joint here.
If we were talking about the shoulders, that’s a ball and socket joint.
Meaning, my exercise variety for shoulders is a lot more than what we have for biceps.
In terms of the fact that they look completely different.
A press looks different than a side-lateral raise, looks different from a front raise,
looks different from rear delt raises.
We have lots of different angles and planes that we work in because of the variety of
the movement that the three-dimensional ball and socket joint provides.
The hinge joint of the elbow dramatically limits our options to a lot of different curls.
Period.
You’re curling with dumbbells, you’re curling with a barbell, you’re curling with
a concentration curl, you’re curling with a spider curl; you’re freaking curling no
matter what you’re doing, guys.
You’re curling.
The thought that you could simply change bicep exercises to create new overload, realizing
once again that they’re all basically formed around the same movement here at the elbow
is not going to work.
Not mention the fact that most of our bicep exercises are pretty limited, in terms of
the ability we have to continue to add weight to them.
Ask yourself the last time you actually increased the amount of weight you’ve used on dumbbell
curls.
If you have, how much have you really increased?
Progressive overload, and overload in, and of itself is pretty difficult to achieve.
You need to do something dramatically different.
And that is, vary the way in which you’re doing your curls.
So, let me show you a few different ways you could do that.
The first thing I like to cover here is one I called “Sliced Reps”.
I take a weight I can normally use for 15 reps and perform a curl all the way to the
top.
When I come down I drop down 1/9 of the way.
You don’t have to get out your compass or going out and figuring out what that is.
Literally, just drop it an estimated 1/9 of the way, and come back up to the top, and
contract.
Then drop down a little more, then come back to the top.
Then a little bit more and come back to the top.
So, through nine levels here it takes you to get all the way to the bottom of the curl.
Then you come all the way back up to the top, then you divide it, and slice it into 8 pieces.
Then you come back down, then you drop it, and you now slice it into 7 pieces.
Ultimately, until you get down to your last two where you’re going down halfway, then
come back up to the top, all the way down, and your last rep is one, full rep.
Now, what is happening here?
We’re increasing our volume within a set.
We’re increasing the number of contractions we get here.
We’re spending a lot more time in the contracted position of the curl because we keep coming
back to it on every slice.
We’re increasing the time under tension throughout the course of this set.
Again, although the range of motion is abbreviated in a single rep, you’re still getting full
range of motion as you go from top to bottom throughout the course of this dropping ladder
here.
The fact is, this is a way to intensify the curl.
That is going to be how you’ll increase your muscle mass, by doing your biceps workouts
again.
You’re adding a way to progressively overload through some stimulus that you haven’t felt
before, as opposed to just saying “I’m going to do a different form of a curl today.”
It’s not enough to just go exercise to exercise.
We don’t have to just use that technique though.
We have other things here, like our arc variation.
With an arc variation we know that the moment arm can be changed.
If we stand here like I am, using a long movement, we keep our forearms straight as long as possible,
and our elbows are just a little bit at the front side of our ribcage, we know we have
a big, long arc.
A long moment arm for the biceps that make that weight feel extremely heavy and put a
great challenge on the biceps.
But we don’t have to stop at that point.
As we get fatigued and tired we can bring our elbows in to the sides now, instead of
in front of our ribcage.
Now, tucked in toward our sides and we continue to curl.
We’ve shortened that moment arm, effectively lightening that weight in our hands to allow
us to keep going.
Then we can drop our arms back even more, even into this drag curl variation that really
shortens the moment arm on the biceps.
Not only that, it changes the strength curve of the exercise, so the hard part isn’t
in the middle of the exercise, but actually here, at the peak contraction of the exercise.
So, we’re able to take failure and extend it further, and further, and further, intensifying
the curl.
Again, it’s all curls.
But we’ve intensified that, and that’s going to lead to bigger biceps in the long
run because you’ve gotten too stale with the fact that you haven’t utilized enough
of these techniques.
I’ll give you one more here.
It’s actually one we use called intensity.
The intensity style here is, you’re actually trying to increase the amount of productive
reps you’re doing with a bit of a heavier weight now.
What we do is take an exercise and go to failure in about five, to six rep range.
Then we rest pause for 10 seconds.
We don’t put the weight down.
We just rest pause.
You’ll see that, guess what?
After about 10, or 15 seconds you can crank out another three reps.
That’s enough time to rest and get out another three reps.
Then you rest again 10 to 15 seconds, and then you go for another three reps.
Then you’re maybe going for two reps.
Then ultimately, you’re going down in singles.
But if you do this for a five minute period of time, when you accumulate the number of
high intensity reps that you did in this one five minute set, and the number of reps you
did with this heavier weight; it’s going to be more than you likely did when you broke
your sets up into the tradition three sets of 12 style.
Again, using a heavier weight anyway to get into this five to six rep range, and you’re
accumulating more of those heavy reps.
So, no matter what style you’re looking for, heavier or lighter weights, 15 rep maxes,
or five to six rep maxes, the key is this: it’s not the exercise variation, guys.
It’s the variation of the intensity techniques you’re using on those exercises that will
matter the most.
As far as frequency goes, if anything, dial it back and see how you do.
I promise you, you’ll probably see a better result from doing that than you are adding
more, and more workouts.
Guys, I hope this was helpful to you.
If you’re looking for a program where we put it all in one complete step by step system,
I actually created something called our Ultimate Arms program.
That’s available over at ATHLEANX.
Guys, it’s not just arm training.
We train athletes here.
It’s a whole entire program, but it has a specialization for arms that helps you overcome
all the mistakes I made.
Not just the ones I point out here.
Everything I think that will help you get better arms in the long run.
Guys, that’s over at ATHLEANX.com.
In the meantime, if you’ve found the video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up.
Let me know what you want me to cover and I’ll do my best to do that for you in the
days and weeks ahead.
See you.