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 am glad that I am with you today, because 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 and 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 needed 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 could continue to kind of progress through my training. Well, 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 kind of like
getting halfway to the solution. And if 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,
I 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 get a much more intense workload
being delivered to the brachialis, which is, again, exactly that muscle that you're trying
to build. So, I worked 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
Pullups 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 into the Pullup. 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 of 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 Kong 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 Kong 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 on the biceps
because it's in line with that cable, right, so, the force is 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 kind of start 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 curl. 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-degree 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
pace and make sure you stop in this mid position, keeping the tension on the entire time because I
drop it from that mid position. The one that's not working is actually staying in the middle portion
of the rep. So, they're both doing a lot of work one isometrically and one concentrically. All
of these exercises, guys round out literally the width of your arm to give you more of
that shirt sleeve filling diameter that you need to make sure that your arms look good, no
matter what angle people look at you from.
And remember you've heard it before, and it's
true, that as that muscle starts to build up, it lies underneath deep to the biceps. It's going
to have that impact of pushing the biceps up to give you not just the width, but also the
height. If you're looking to get wider arms, guys, there's no way around this. This is one
of those situations where it's the muscle that's responsible for that. And when you just skip past
it by not doing direct work for the brachialis, you will never have the width in your biceps that
you need to. So, if you have to, substitute 1 or 2 of those extra variations of curls that you're
doing right now for a brachialis exercise or two, and I promise you you'll be on the right path.
But if you really want to start to get them to grow faster, dedicate an entire workout to your
brachialis maybe once a week in addition to your regular arm or pull training and I promise
you, you'll start to see those gains come quite quickly. If you're looking for more science-based
tips and exercises, you can find them not only here on this channel, but over at Athleanx.com. If
you haven't done so, click Subscribe and turn on your Notifications so you never miss a video when
we put one out. All right guys, see you soon.
