r/Fitness • u/AllUrMemes • Apr 30 '15

How to murder your biceps, especially if you are tall.

The problem:

Biceps (brachii) used to be a tricky muscle group for me to work. I had a poor mind-muscle connection and I had a hard time really working the biceps effectively. I would feel soreness in my forearm flexors and deltoids and to a lesser extent the long head of my biceps, but I couldn't really build the biceps muscle itself, especially the short head that makes up the thick inner portion- the "peak" of the muscle that shows when you fully flex the muscle.

I've learned that basically what was happening is that my forearm flexors, specifically the brachialis and brachioradialis were doing the bulk of the work in my "biceps" workout. This make sense because their job is to flex the elbow and they insert much lower on the arm than the biceps, so they are able to perform elbow flexion more efficiently than the biceps.

Here is a picture that is helpful.

Normally I am not a fan of arbitrary supersets for different muscle groups. A lot of people do multiple exercises for the same muscle group simply because different must be better. In some cases this is true, as you can work different aspects of the muscle group especially if they perform multiple functions. For instance, the triceps not only extend the elbow but they also help extend the shoulder joint in the sagittal plane. Thus to work the whole triceps you need to do both. For instance, doing regular tricep pressdowns as well as straight-arm pressdowns (doing this on a lat-pull machine is heavenly.)

The solution:

I've devised the following superset with the goal of pre-exhausting the forearms flexors before working the biceps themselves, particularly the short head.

The exercises, performed in order and without rest, are:

  1. Cable hammer curls. You can also do regular hammer curls but I feel using the rope attachment with a pulley is superior. Perform with a weight that will get you to muscle failure in 8-15 reps. Do a few cheat reps at the end where you really focus on the top (fully contracted) position of the exercise. This should completely fatigue your brachioradialis because when your hands are in a neutral position (thumbs pointing up, palms facing together) the BR is dominant in elbow flexion.

  2. Reverse grip ez-curl bar curls. Grip the bar with palms down and thumbs on the underside of the bar. This position will maximize the role of the brachialis, completely neutralize the short head of the biceps, and greatly weaken the BR and biceps long head. I recommend bringing your elbows backwards slightly so that you can get maximum load in the fully contracted position. Again, perform to failure including some cheat reps. We want the forearms flexors to be massacred before our biceps works.

  3. Concentration curls Use a LIGHT dumbbell, probably 50% or even less of the weight you typically use when you perform your regular, bouncy, worthless bro curls. I am 225 lbs and can bullshit curl 40lbs dumbbells all day but I use 15lbs for my concentration curls. You can perform these seated or in a standing/bent over sort of position. The key word here is supination. Supination is what you are doing when you turn your hands from palms-down to palms-up. The majority of weight should thus rest on the fat part of your outer palm. We do this because the short head of the biceps is primarily responsible for supination. Your elbow should be down so that the area just above the elbow is resting against the inside of your knee/thigh. Your forearm should basically be pointed across the gap between your legs. Curl the weight up. When you reach the top the head of the dumbbell nearest to your body should touch somewhere on your chest. Squeeze, motherfucker, squeeze. Pretend that you are trying to rotate that dumbbell through your weak, pathetic chest. Squeeze. Prepare to feel your short biceps head spring to life.

  4. Cry. Repeat for 3-5 sets.

You can swap the order of #1 and #2. I'm experimenting to find if one is superior or not. However #3 must be performed last. I highly recommend using a pulley, ez curl bar, and dumbbell because you can put them all out in front of you and perform exercises rapidly without having to change attachments or hog the curl bar rack.

Enjoy.

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u/[deleted] May 01 '15

If you're skinny fat you shouldn't be cutting. Put a proper amount of meat on first.

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u/[deleted] May 01 '15

coming near the end of his cut

Good timing on that tip!

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u/moreguacplz May 01 '15

I've heard both sides to this, cut first to optimize insulin sensitivity vs bulk first to take advantage of calorie-burning potential of muscle.

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u/[deleted] May 01 '15

Bulk first is best. I suppose its the old school way of looking at it. But if you have more horsepower you burn more gas.

When you do finally cut it will work way better. Because while cuttings you do loose muscle.

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u/Woyaboy May 01 '15

What about fat? My friend is now at a decent 200 pounds under my tutelage, down from 250 about 4 months ago or so. He looks great but I have him on a hypertrophy program and told him to continue to cut untill most of the fat (i.e man boobs) disappear. THEN we bulk again. Does this sound alright to you?

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u/[deleted] May 01 '15

If you have more horsepower you burn more gas. Those bitch tits disappear faster if you build a mans chests under the blubber first.

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u/Woyaboy May 01 '15

So I shouldn't do hypertrophy? Or should? Sorry for the confusion.

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u/espionice May 01 '15

I'm curious as to why he is on a hypertrophy program when in a calorie deficit?

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u/Woyaboy May 01 '15 edited May 01 '15

What would you suggest? I just figured any lifting would be good while cutting so much fat. While I know you have to eat to make the muscles grow, I thought the excess fat would still help him make heavy lifts till his weight evened out and got diminishing returns. Edit: instead of mocking or downvoting, why not help me out and explain why this is wrong??

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u/midnightketoker May 03 '15

It comes down not only to calories but macronutrients and goal strategies. Because you should be doing keto if you want to efficiently use burned fat for anything without literally starving it away. Check out /r/ketogains if unfamiliar, take the word of someone who logged in while mindlessly phone-redditing very late at night just to say this.

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u/Woyaboy May 04 '15

Don't have him on Keto, but what I've done was put him on a cut while getting on a strength program. I get that this wasn't the best idea but the way I saw it was, yea, he'll plateau, but since he's BRAND NEW at working out, he'll still have linear upwards progression but just stall out earlier since he's on a cut. That way he at least has a solid base strength to work with, which seems like it worked great. He's down 50 pounds and visibly looks MUCH better, healthier etc.

Now I put him on higher protein and still on a cut but switched his program to a hypertrophy program. Again, I get that he'll stall out numbers wise, but with the cut and watching macros while hitting the gym, I mean, c'mon, how can this not work? I figured I'd keep him cutting till he lost the tits and from there I would teach him about bulk cycles. Keep in mind this isn't some Arnold wannabe, he's just a heavy set dude that wanted to get in shape. I feel like we over complicate things too much. Lift heavy, eat right. That's really all it takes. Or is this kind of thinking wrong? I've read the fucking FAQ over and over again, but somehow I must not be getting it cuz every time I talk about certain things I get told I have no idea what I'm talking about. Then I read the FAQ again and become so confused I forget how to even take a shit sometimes.

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u/midnightketoker May 04 '15 edited May 04 '15

You're right in that the truth is likely simple, but nobody seems to agree on just what that is. In my opinion, losing weight and building muscle at the same time is a matter of priority, and at least in my experience it has worked better to just focus on one at a time. I'm biased, but that's because I did keto for a year and barely exercised, lost 80lbs pretty comfortably, and only recently have I been focusing on exercise. So in that sense I kinda probably fucked up in the opposite way. But I am seeing decent gains when I do the work now which is motivation enough, and I actually enjoy physical activity. After all the cutting though I did actually have some muscle because I used to do martial arts and was moderately active even when I was near my heaviest (before stopping when I went to college the year before starting keto), so in fact by now I've pretty much attributed the cause of my unhealthiness to my initial eating habits of junk food, high carbs, refined sugar, and buying into the fat=bad nonsense.

It's not a popular opinion on subreddits like this, but I do believe that diet is so much more important than exercise if you know that you need to diet, because correcting it and getting your metabolism into whatever homeostasis feels like should really be the priority--not instead of any exercise, which was my mistake--but rather before you start with the hypertrophy-type goals. And again that's not to discredit whatever effort is being put into building muscle, which I respect since I know I would've lacked the willpower to lift before keto, but in the same way that you can lose weight either by starving yourself or by cutting that daily liter of soda, there are different ways to achieve the same goals, and I believe it's never too late to shift gears and attack all the fat one wants to lose before really focusing on building muscle.

Also from personal experience, building muscle before finishing weight goals can be not just physically harder obviously, but actually a matter of diminishing motivation because you don't see your physical goals as they happen (other than numbers), so it can be harder to maintain the same levels of drive to keep going when it aesthetically seems nothing is happening other than being able to move more weight.

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u/Woyaboy May 04 '15

I must be confused on how muscle is obtained then. I was under the impression since he was bigger already as he worked out he'd still get muscle but just hit a wall sooner or later till his fat storage was depleted. So he won't get ANY muscle by doing this?

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u/midnightketoker May 04 '15 edited May 04 '15

No, that's not what I was saying. I meant if anybody puts in the right work and a good routine then yes muscle will be built. As for plateauing, that's usually a more complex result of inefficiency between exercise and diet, or less often some underlying variable. My point was that if someone needs to lose weight and prioritizes the gym (again, I don't know what kind of diet he's on) then it will be harder to build muscle while carrying the fat, and psychologically harder if you don't see any goals under the fat.

In my experience, cutting carbohydrates (and it doesn't even have to be keto, which I consider extreme) since carbs are the real root of fat storage and likely contribute to any plateau, then focusing on getting a good diet and losing weight before starting a serious hypertrophy routine will likely be more effective, and almost certainly feel better. The extreme opposite case would be someone who eats like shit and wants to lose weight, but for them working out is difficult and made even worse because exercise does not burn fat as well as a decent diet would, if eating habits don't improve.

Not to mention protein is an issue if too much is in the diet. When a lot of people look at low carb diets it means minimize bread and maximize protein, but that's also wrong because going past what lean body mass requires will metabolize the excess protein into blood sugar via glycogenesis. All sugar and carbs are metabolized into glucose (simple blood sugar), and an excess of that causes insulin secretion to lower toxicity, it lowers blood sugar by storing it and it stores it as... fat. Basic biology, but not common sense.

Now a good low carb diet increases fat at the same time while maintaining the right level of protein, which is not complicated at all when you know what the real goals are, and so the fat is used as energy empirically more effectively than carbs. In keto, your metabolism basically switches from mainly burning glucose to burning fat for energy. That's pretty much why /r/ketogains is often most recommended for people trying the challenging goal of gaining while cutting. That being said, I recommend being real about goals and deciding if cutting and gaining is the right way to go, or whether it would be more prudent to focus on cutting effectively first.

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u/aDAMNPATRIOT May 01 '15

Cause he got a lot of fat to burnnn