6 BEST Biceps Exercises (DON’T SKIP THESE!!)

When it comes to picking the best biceps exercises, we need to look at which ones compliment the functions of the biceps best. In this video, I am going to pick what I feel are the 6 best exercises to grow bigger biceps and as always, I am going to provide the science behind why these 6 exercises sh

what’s up guys jeff cavill here athleanx. com today we’re going to cover the six best bicep exercises that’s right six not the only two because i don’t since when do we live in a world where we’re forced to choose just two of anything abundance is the rule of the day here however that being said six is going to cut it because what we want to do is select the bicep exercises that fill in all the gaps and actually put the science behind the selection of those exercises to make sure that you’re not missing out in any of the areas that you could use more help so let’s start breaking them down here guys one by one so when it comes to the bicep exercises guys the number one you have to start with always is a version of a barbell curl i said a version of a barbell curl because the standard barbell curl is something we can actually get the benefits of in other ways i’m going to show you how to actually take that to another level but the cheek curl is one that i’ve been preaching here for a very long time because of the benefits it provides us how is it different well what you see here is that i’m allowing a little bit of momentum to help me to get the weight up but only if you’re using weight that’s heavier than you’re used to potentially using on a regular performed barbell curl in other words what you can concentrically lift we’re going to take care of that again i said that in a different exercise here we want to take advantage of the fact that our muscles are stronger eccentrically than they are concentrically so we can get that way up via a little bit of a cheat then we can overload the eccentric which is a known stimulus for hypertrophy now keep in mind when i go up into this sort of cheap portion here i’m making sure not to break the vertical what i mean by that is i have this imaginary vertical line behind my body i’m not breaking through it and actually leaning backwards through it because i’m taking away a lot of the work of the biceps in order to do that and i’m now at this point simply just heaving the weight you got to be able to stop that momentum at vertical and let the biceps do the work and from there of course slowly lower the barbell down to put that eccentric overload on the biceps all right next up is an exercise that also allows us to do what the barbell curl does and that’s progressively overload but it does so in the form of our own body weight and this is the chin up certainly the best bicep exercise you can do with your own body weight but it’s actually one of the best exercises period because we can add additional weight if we want to to continue to progressively overload the exercise but more importantly here this exercise trains ourselves to utilize the biceps to not just pull ourselves up to the bar but also to control that descent it’s another eccentrically overloaded exercise as i get closer to the bar at towards the top of the exercise you can see the engagement here of the biceps and as i go down i can actually lean back just a little bit to accentuate that stretch to once again make sure that i’m getting those eccentric benefits usually the exercise itself and its pure body weight form is damn challenging for most people but if you need b you have that option to add more weight to keep the gains coming so there you have it guys your two exercises for building big biceps you don’t need to watch the rest of the video if you believe in that there’s a reason why there are other things that we’re going to show here and your gains will benefit from watching i promise so let’s talk about the next one it’s the dumbbell cross body curl and this is going to provide benefits that are different and unique to this exercise that weren’t provided from the first two even though i love those first two exercises what we’re gonna do here is we’re gonna be able to hit the brachialis more effectively because of the positioning of the dumbbell during this exercise the pronated grip here during the exercise is going to allow us to take away one of the functions that the biceps provides which is supination of that forearm and by doing so we’re still getting the elbow flexion component of any curl and that’s going to be driven more effectively especially if done at slower speeds by the brachialis and there’s no reason to avoid brachialis development if you want to build your overall upper arm size we know that building up the brachialis will thicken the arms widen them out in the short sleeves and also contribute to the overall mass of the upper arm because it lies underneath the biceps so no reason to cut ourselves at just two guys include this one as well and i promise you you’re gonna be happy you did all right so i mentioned that there’s other ways that we can curl and there’s actually ways we can accentuate the normal curl and that is with this banded dumbbell curl so the dumbbell curl gives us the opportunity to do the more strict standard version of the curl where the overload is really focused on the concentric portion of the lift but the additional band here is going to apply a different strength curve we know that when we do a regular curl the strength curve looks something like this it’s a little bit easier in the beginning hardest here in the middle and then a little easier again as we get towards the top when we use a band the curve changes dramatically it starts out pretty easy because there’s very little tension on the band and it continues to ramp up as we go all the way up to the top it gets to its most tension because the band is stretched to its greatest length so if we can overlap the two we can fill in the gaps we don’t have to have that leveling out and drop off in the middle we can continue to keep that going because the band will provide that for us and that’s exactly what we’re doing here so again we want to say that we’re limited to just a couple exercises how are you filling in the gaps of this you’re not and again i’m not saying you need to do all of these in every workout but this should certainly make its way into some portion of your overall biceps training approach all right moving on if you’re going to build your biceps up you have to respect the fact that you don’t want to just focus on the sweet spot in other words the mid-range of all the exercises you’re performing because we also want to apply attention to whatever muscle we’re trying to build in the other ranges of motion the other portions of the overall range of motion meaning in the area where the biceps is going to be most lengthened or stretched in the area where the biceps are going to be most shortened or in the contracted position my choice for that stretch position here is the incline dumbbell curl but i call this the incline stretch curl because there’s a couple things we can do to make it even more effective for that goal obviously you’re going to use lighter weights here because you’re placing your biceps in the stretch position and they’re going to be weaker anyway but you want to take it to the next level by applying a deeper stretch and you could do that by simply pronating the forearms at the bottom of the curl now remember the incline setup itself is going to take your arm and put it back behind your body into extension if we realize the full capability of the bicep is not just to supinate and flex the elbow here but to also flex the shoulder then taking that shoulder down into extension is something that we want to do and adding the additional pronation takes care of that second component as well the third thing we can do here is we can actually consciously contract the triceps i’ve shared this ti