6 Reasons Your Biceps Aren’t Bigger (ACTUAL SCIENCE)

If you can’t get big biceps no matter what you do, you are likely making one or more of these 6 biceps mistakes. In this video, I am going to show you the 6 biggest biceps training mistakes you are likely making that is keeping you from having big arms. Not only am I going to help you identify the b

I’d like you to try something very quickly for  me that will tell me a lot about how effective your bicep training is right now. And it starts  by just simply bending your elbow and squeezing your bicep as hard as you possibly can. And what  I’m looking for here is a discomfort that will be what we want. If you don’t get it, then twist  your wrist over a little bit more and turn it out and see if that elicits that cramping discomfort. If it still doesn’t do it, then lift the elbow up just to about here, holding on to that twisted  wrist and see if that elicits a discomfort.

Now, whether or not you had the discomfort down  here, here or even up here or not at all, tells me a lot about the way that you should  be performing your bicep exercises. What’s up guys, Jeff Cavaliere athleanx. com. When it comes to building big biceps, if you’re watching this video, you’re likely  making some mistakes. But that’s okay because that’s where I come in to help you out.

And I’m  going to point out the six biggest ones that I see almost everybody make every single day. And it  starts with not lifting the weight the right way. If you’re doing this on a curl, you’re not doing  it right. It’s because most of us simply focus on moving from point A to point Z, not realizing  that the real benefit of the exercise is learning how to hit every single letter in between. You need to slow every repetition down.

And I don’t care if that means you need to sacrifice  some of the weight you’re using on any of the curl exercises you’re doing. Four seconds up,  four seconds down is a good place to start. You’re actually recruiting more motor units  to the exercise at hand and more specifically, bicep motor units. We’re not just letting  the other muscles or the other elbow flexors, like the brachioradialis and brachialis, do the  job. You’re learning how to contract your way through the exercise, and by doing so, you get  more effective repetitions every single one you do.

If you’re not doing any of this slow-motion  training right now, then I highly encourage you to implement at least one or two sets, and I  promise you you’ll feel it better and ultimately, you’ll look better because of it. Which brings me to mistake number two. And since I’ve got you doing some demonstrations for  me, I want you to do one more. This one’s simple. This time, when you curl, I want you to keep your  wrist straight with your fingers straight up and down.

And I want you to feel that contraction  I just talked about as you pull up. Now, contrast that with bending your wrist backwards,  even as you fix it from the top. Here you should automatically feel a much stronger contraction,  but I want you to do it. As you curl up, you start to bend that wrist back, and if  you don’t get that cramping feeling before, you might actually start feeling it right away. Why is this happening?

Because the extension of the wrist will help to take some of the forearm  out of the exercise. And though that may not be that big a deal for people who want bigger  forearms, I can guarantee you if you’re trying to get bigger biceps, it’s a problem. You focus  too much on maintaining this stable wrist here, and that’s causing you to take away some of the  focus on just lifting the weight. As a physical therapist, I’m telling you right now, there’s  nothing wrong with allowing wrist extension as you lift the bar up. It’s actually quite  natural.

If I was going to push against something, I’m going to do it with a slightly extended  wrist because that’s the strongest position of the wrist. So, allowing yourself to get  into a stronger wrist position is not going to all of a sudden disintegrate the bones  in your wrist. Carry that bar in the middle portion of your palm right here, not in the  distal portion of your fingers. And you’ll not only have a more effective curl on every  single repetition you do, but you’ll actually have a more biomechanically correct curl. Mistake number three is actually a big one, and it’s not really your fault because it’s based  on the advice you’ve been given.

But it doesn’t make it any less of a mistake and you need to  fix it. And as you likely been told that, hey, look, it doesn’t matter how many curls you  do, just stick to a few basic ones. However, make sure you’re doing enough of them because  volume is what really drives bicep gains. No, it’s not. As a matter of fact, I’d rather see  you do far less sets of bicep training and focus more on the variation of the curl that you’re  doing, because all curls are not the same.

See, if I break out my old trusty muscle markers,  I can show you exactly what I’m talking about. We know that if you look at the bottom half  here of the bicep, I could actually basically find this little split right about here and  that I could trace right down, of course, go all the way up to the top, but this right here  would be the short head of my bicep. Okay? And what this is responsible for, you can see, is the  width of the arm when looked at from the front. Of course, with the Brachialis too, but it’s that  overhang that comes in this direction that the short head of the biceps is responsible for.

And then we can take the red marker and basically fill in the blanks with everything around that’s  left. And you’ll see that this, which we call the long head, is responsible more for the height,  right? The peak of the biceps. Whether I look at it from here, it’s what you see at the top  or whether I look at it from here. And again, if I look at it from this side here, it provides  quite a big peak when looked at from behind.

Well, it’s not necessarily what’s going on in the front  side that should be of interest to you. It’s what’s going on inside the shoulder joint that  really makes the difference between the exercise choices here. Because the attachments matter. The short head of the bicep, the one over here attaches lower down to the scapula, but at a  lower point the coracoid process. Whereas the long head of the bicep attaches further, actually  crosses the shoulder joint and attaches to the top of that joint.

Well, what’s the difference? The  one that crosses the shoulder joint actually has an impact on the exercises you do. Because  if you place that shoulder into extension, you’ll get greater stretch, which can help to  recruit more muscle fibers to the exercise. So stronger contractions. So, making sure that not  all of your bicep workouts are focused on either one type or the other, but including both.

And again, you could do fewer sets if you’ve got more of that representation across both heads  of the biceps. So, what are we looking at? Arms out exercises once with your arms in front of  you are going to generally be more short head focused. Why? Because with the arm out in front  your shoulders in some flexion, you’re taking away some of that stretch benefit and pre-activation  that would contribute more to the long head being a little bit more preferentially active.

Remember  this is not about isolating one head versus the other, this is about preferentially impacting  one a little bit more than the other. Whereas exercises that have your arms back behind your  body like an incline curl, are going to give you a chance to get a little bit more of that stretch,  to focus a little bit more on the long head. Another guideline for you could be this, it’s  very simple, what you see is what you train. So, if you look in the mirror and you’re seeing the  inside portion or the short head of the biceps by doing exercises like a no money curl, for  instance, you’re going to be training a little bit mo