If you have skinny arms that you want to get wider biceps so you can fill out your shirt sleeves, you are going to want to watch this video. Here, I am going to show you the only way for you to get wider biceps and get bigger, thicker arms in the process. More often than not, people will focus their attention to the height of their arms by working on building up their bicep peaks. While this is will help to grow bigger biceps and bigger arms in the process, it’s not how you grow wider biceps.
In order to get wider biceps, especially when you viewed from the front, you are actually going to want limit the biceps involvement and focus on another muscle in the upper arm; the brachialis. If you don’t know where it is, the muscle is situated beneath the biceps and is slightly visible if you flex the arm and palpate on the outside of it. Just underneath the long head of the biceps and located between the biceps and triceps, the brachialis is muscle responsible for elbow flexion.
Unlike the biceps however, the brachialis only has the job of flexing the elbow as opposed to being able to supinate the forearm and flex the shoulder. The main difference however is that due to the fact that a muscle is strongest in its midrange, the brachialis is going to be more strongly contributing to elbow flexion in the beginning third to half of an elbow bend and the biceps will kick in more strongly from the midpoint up.
Now, since the two muscles share the common function of flexing the elbow, it is impossible to completely isolate one muscle over the other. That being said, there are a few things you can do to favor the brachialis by reducing some of the contribution of the biceps by impairing it’s preferred action (supination) which can be done by simply keeping the forearm pronated.
The reason you want to focus on the brachialis as opposed to the biceps themselves is that by building up this muscle, you are actually going to be thickening the outer side of the upper arm, between the biceps and triceps. Training this muscle will also increase the biceps peaks, creating a fuller appearance overall and allowing you to fill those shirt sleeves.
You might be thinking that the best exercise for targeting this brachialis is the hammer curl. While this is certainly an option, it’s not going to give you the optimal results you are looking for simply because the grip needed to hold the dumbbells during a hammer curl is neutral as as opposed to the pronation you are ideally looking for.
Instead, we need to find exercises that will have you using a pronated grip as opposed to neutral or supinated.
The first exercise in your arsenal to attack this muscle is the cross body hammer curl. This version of the hammer curl allows you to stay pronated through the concentric portion of the lift, meaning that you will be preferentially targeting the brachialis as opposed to the biceps. You will likely be using lighter weights than you would on a traditional hammer curl, but that’s okay. Lighter weights doesn’t mean less gains.
The next exercise is a close grip pull up. Utilizing bodyweight for this exercise will allow you to provide more overload to the muscle than you would traditionally be able to using free weights. If you are not strong enough to perform pull-ups without assistance, that it is fine. Instead of skipping the exercise altogether, I implore you to use a resistance band under your feet in order to allow you to perform the exercise in the first place. You will still be able to overload the brachialis this way.
The third exercise up is the Kong curl, a cable curl variation that takes some of the stress off the biceps by once again performing them out of a more pronated position and with less tension in the fully elongated or stretch position. This is not a cable crossover. This is not for the chest. You want to curl your hand in a similar manner to the cross body hammer curl.
This particular exercise allowed me to transition back to doing the standard cable curl. Coming off the biceps tear this was something I just simply could not do. Not only did this biceps exercise help me to build up to that but it also noticeably helped to build back some of the width to the upper arm that was lacking after the injury.
Lastly, we have something called a drop curl. Here you keep the tension on the brachialis by holding the "non-working" dumbbell in the midrange position. Alternating dropping one dumbbell down at a time and keep the hand facing down or slightly down in order to minimize the biceps and maximize the brachialis.
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7 авг 2024
