Biceps Peaks - 5 Best Ways to Build Them! (BOULDERS)

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What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today I’m going to show you five ways to start building up those bicep peaks of yours to get them to stand at attention and we’re using two muscle markers to get the job done. So without further ado, let me start drawing all over this damn arm to make it that much easier for you to understand.

Okay, so as you can guess, the bicep is a two headed muscle, with each head having a different attachment here in the shoulder, which allows us to hit it a little bit differently, and in influence it a bit differently depending upon the exercise we choose and the way we do the exercises. That being said, you have to see which one is which. Right here we have a short head and a long head. Now, the short head is going to be the one that is closer to the inside of our body – closer to our chest – and the long head is going to be on the outside. But we could actually get more specific than that with the markers.

So you can see that right there, you can almost see as light shading right along that line right there. More importantly you can see that as the bicep comes around the corner it kind of comes up and then it starts to go off in that direction. That little turn is the bottom of the short head. So if we go and take our marker, we can come around this way, up under here, and of course it’s going to go over our shoulder which we’ll take a look at in a second. Then right where it makes that turn, right up in through here, it comes down, and then it comes back down through here.

So we’ve got the short head of the bicep looking like that. Now, what leaves the long head? The rest of it. So if we take our other marker here, we’ve got the long head coming up and around this way and back, and then diving down that way. So now, the important point to make here is that the long head is actually the one responsible for the peak.

The peak is happening right up here on top of the bicep. The long head is the one responsible for that peak. The medial head – or the short head – is the one responsible more for bicep width. You can see when my arm from here is what is responsible for the width of the bicep. That doesn’t mean we don’t want to train both areas, but if we’re talking about bicep peaks here, this is how we’re going to go get it.

So taking a quick look beneath the surface here and putting the science back in strength as we like to do, you’ll see that the long head bicep tendon actually crosses on the further outside potion of the arm and it attaches to the top of what we call the glenoid, or the ball and socket joint. Right in here, right in through the heart of the joint. Whereas the short head of the bicep, more on the inside portion of the arm attaches to what they call the coracoid process, which is right there. You can see quickly – something I’ll elaborate more on a future video – the short head of the biceps never really get in trouble or cause much pain because it’s further out of the joint, away from all the action. Whereas the long head runs right up this groove and it frays itself over and back, up and down as you raise your arm and can tend to get inflamed and often times be misdiagnosed as something like a rotator cuff tear.

We can go over that more in the future, but the point being is the locations here do have different impacts on the exercises that you do. That leads us perfectly to our first point. That is, if you want to target the long head more then you want to makes sure that your grip is narrow and your elbows are close to your body. So if you look at something like this you’re going to see the area that you can actually see is the area that you’re actually working. It’s the way that it works here for the biceps.

When we take our grip wide and we take our elbows away from our body the more area we can see here is going to be the inside – short head – that’s getting more o the attention. So if you were going to try to build bigger bicep peaks, if you’re doing an exercise like a curl, watch as I grab here. A narrow grip. You can feel that right away. If you do a cross body curl, this way here, you can see that you’re really focusing on that elbow tight, narrowing positioning and you can feel it immediately here and in the outer head, or the long head of the bicep.

The next point actually relates to a mistake that a lot of us make when we’re doing our bicep training. It has a direct impact on the strength of contraction, ultimately the bicep peaks that you can get from your bicep training. That is, you never want to have your wrists participating too much in the bicep curl because the more your wrist participates the more your forearm is and the less your bicep is. So one of the best ways you can actually help to build your peak is to keep your wrists bent backward throughout the exercise. We like to call that a “Waiter’s Tray” position.

Watch, I’m doing a basic barbell curl again. Now, the common way to do this is as we get fatigued we try to curl too much with our forearm trying to get some extra help. That is, in fact, taking some of the good work away from the biceps. What we want to do is eliminate that; get the forearms out of this. It’s not their job at the moment.

Keep them in this backward, waiter position and you should immediately feel a much stronger contraction at peak contraction on the curl. This is something that can apply to every single bicep exercise that you do, even this bicep chin curl that I’m doing. You can notice that I’m keeping my wrist in this slightly extended position throughout, just to make sure that the focus is never on the forearms, but all on the biceps. The third thing you want to do is make sure that you’re fully supinating your wrists at the top of every bicep exercise. Providing that your mobility in your wrist allows you to, you want to make sure you take advantage of that because you’re not only going to get a stronger contraction, but you’re going to allow the long head to do the work for you.

It’s a better supinator of the wrist because of its alignment and positioning than the short head. What you can do is, make sure no matter what exercise you’re doing, you’re really squeezing and supinating at the top. You can see as I do that, if I just do a contraction to here that’s how much I get. If I go a little bit more and supinate a little bit more you can see that the peak stands up even more. Again, you do it here, this is a contraction.

I continue, I continue, I continue, I continue; I could literally see it raise up further and further. So you want to make sure that – if your wrist mobility allows you to – don’t’ ever shy away from that really, really strong contraction at the top by ensuring that you’re fully supinated at the top. On the fourth point here we actually have to look back at that anatomy again. If you remember, that long head tendon actually crosses the shoulder joint. It ran over the shoulder joint which means it has an action and involvement with the shoulder that the short head does not.

So if we want to actually preferentially hit the long head of the bicep, we want to find exercise that will involve the shoulder and place it into a bit more stretched position so we can get a stronger contraction from the long head. We can do that by placing our shoulder here into extension back behind our body. You can automatically see it again; the tension that starts to happen here in the long head. So we can do this with – as you could probably imagine – you could see here and incline curl. Obviously the setup of this exercise positions us perfectly for our arm to be back behind our body.

Something maybe not so obvious, something like a drag curl. Drag curls are great for hitting the long head. They’re great for allowing us to reach that peak contraction, they’re great for allowing us to keep the wrists in that bent back posit