STOP, You’re Training Your Biceps All Wrong!

If you want to know how to build bigger biceps, how to get bigger biceps, or how to build big biceps that look thicker from every angle, this video shows you why simply doing more curls may not be the answer. You can perform barbell curls, dumbbell curls, preacher curls, hammer curls and cable curls

If you’re having a hard time filling your shirt sleeves, and the situation only gets worse when people look at you from the front, well, you’ve got a width problem. And all the bicep curl variations in the world are not going to solve it. I’m going to help you to solve that width problem with the only way that I know how. As a matter of fact, it worked for me, and there was one very unfortunate incident that actually led me to being forced to do all these things I’m going to show you here today once again. And guess what?

They led to the same results that I expected, and I expect to deliver to you today, too. Because, I’m waving around this muscle marker, we have to start by looking a little bit at the anatomy. When we look at the arm inside of a shirt sleeve, we look and focus, of course, on the bicep. But, the width of the overall arm is being impacted by not the bicep, but by this muscle right here. And that’s the brachialis.

And of course, the muscle marker helps me to locate that for you very easily. But, you can locate it for yourself by just simply grabbing your fingers over the top of your bicep to where it starts to drop in. And right after your fingers, that muscle that pops out right there is the brachialis, and that’s the one that you have to train specifically if you want to grow your biceps to be thicker or wider. And guess what? When you grow them this way, this muscle will also hypertrophy and push the biceps up as well to help you to fill up that shirt sleeve, no matter what angle people are looking at.

Now, I mentioned an unfortunate incident. It was an injury to my biceps where I actually tore my biceps trying to hold my son up on the ice. Well, it forced me to change my training around, and this is where you’re going to benefit. Because, if we look at these biceps again, you can see the difference. This is the end of this bicep, and this is my elbow.

This is the end of this bicep, and this is the elbow. You can see how much of a difference there is in terms of the gap that’s there as a result of that torn bicep. Well, along with this gap, the torn long head of the bicep created a lack of width, something that I need to be able to train around, not to mention the fact that when I had the injured bicep, there’s a lot of pain with my training. I had to figure out ways to train around that injured bicep, so I wasn’t stressing the area that was so hurt so I can continue to progress through my training. When you think about how you’re trying to train your arms right now to get them wider, if you’re not dedicating your focus on that brachialis muscle, then you’re not going to grow them.

Now, you probably said, “Great, I got it. Hammer curls. I’ve been doing these for a long time. ” No. See, the hammer curl is not necessarily fixing your problem because it’s it’s kind of like getting halfway to the solution.

Again, if you look at this anatomically, you’ll see that when I put my arm in this position here, when I go from a pronated position to a neutral position, look at the action of the bicep. There’s clearly activity in the bicep just to go from a pronated wrist here and forearm to a neutral forearm, right? We get that bicep activation. Well, in this position here that we perform a hammer curl, we’re going to get a decent involvement of the biceps. If I’m trying to turn them off or get them to be less involved, you can’t completely turn them off whenever you’re flexing your elbow, but if I want to get them less involved, then I want to perform this variation instead.

This is a cross-body hammer curl. And the main difference is I’m performing it with that fully pronated forearm. When I get in this position here and I drag my arm up close to my body, you’re going to much more intense workload being delivered to the brachialis, which is again exactly that muscle that you’re trying to build. So, I work these into all of my bicep workouts. Whenever I would either train my arms, a pull workout, or my biceps directly, this would be the exercise that I chose.

Now, I didn’t just stop here because I wanted to be able to make sure I can go back to doing pull-ups again. And chin-ups were out of the equation. For the moment when the biceps was torn, there was way too much load on them to be able to withstand any type of chinning activity. So, instead I went overhand to the pull-up. But again, I wanted to minimize the contribution of the biceps.

So, how do I do that? I take a really narrow grip. And if you have to use a band like this on the pull-up bar to assist you, then by all means do it. I still want you doing the exercise. You should be able to do at least 10 to 12 repetitions, whether that be with a band or your own body weight if you want to start to build this muscle up.

So, to do this, the hands in narrow, you can see forced that flexion at the elbow, but again with a pronated grip, so I can kind of decrease some of the contributions in the bicep, but focus on getting that really heavy overload of the elbow flexion, which again will hit the brachialis really really well. Now, this next one was a bit accidental. Again, remember I was talking about I was rehabbing a bicep, but out of all unfortunate situations, sometimes we really get lucky. In this case, I really did, because this is something that I went on to call a calm curl, and I did this on Instagram, and people actually really found the exercise to be helpful. But, what the focus of this exercise was, or where it started, was out of a variation of a cable curl.

When you do a cable curl, the nice thing is there’s not so much stress on the bicep in the fully extended position. And as you can imagine, with a torn bicep, I don’t want a lot of stress at the fully extended position as I’m trying to come back and get myself into more intense bicep training. But, as I get to the top, I get good tension at peak contraction of the biceps. Well, I couldn’t handle this in the beginning. So, instead what I did was I just shortened that down a little bit, and performed this variation, which again we call the calm curl.

And this is not a chest exercise. I’m not trying to do a cable crossover. What I want you to do from this position is maintain some of that pronated forearm positioning, and then just curl until your hand meets your chest. And again, do this in alternating fashion. And at the extended position here, not only do I have less stress in the biceps because it’s in line with that cable, right?

So, the forces through the cable decrease the tension on the biceps, but it’s also because I’m in that pronated position like we talked about. And what I found was that the thickness of the arm started to come back much faster than even when I had done workouts that didn’t include this. But, then I knew that there’s one other thing that I could introduce as well to transition back to regular curls or dumbbell curls. And it was this, and we call this a drop curl. And what’s cool about this exercise is again, it’s performed out of a modified position.

I’m not in a fully supinated position at any point in the curls. But what’s most notable here is the speed that I’m doing the exercise at. You want to go very slow and controlled in the first half of that curl, because we know it’s within that first half that the brachialis is doing more of the work. As we get past the 90° mark, the bicep starts to take over, especially as we get into some shoulder flexion towards the end range of the exercise. So, if you want this to be really, really effective at building your brachialis, then drop the weight to the point that you can handle it at a very slow pa