These Optimized Exercises BLOW UP Your Arms

Chapters:

00:00 Start

00:23 Get More Out of Your Overhead Triceps Extensions

02:47 Bicep Training

06:24 Concentration Curls

Transcript:

Over at triceps extensions have become a lot more popular recently as people’s favorite triceps exercise, and that’s for good reason. a study found that if you compare push downs and overhead triceps extensions, the overhead triceps extensions stimulates significantly more growth in the triceps muscle. However, many people do their triceps extensions in a probably slightly suboptimal manner. So here are some tips to get more out of your overhead triceps extensions.

First, if you have a big dumbbell so this is a small one. I’m going to use small ones to illustrate the exercise but if you have a big one in particular, you can use an off-hand grip. So if you used it in the middle that will hit your body. And that might limit your range of motion. Generally more range of motion is good, especially when it’s at longer muscle lengths. So what you can do is use an off-hand grip instead of just a regular grip. And that means there is less space and you can get a bigger range of motion. Second, the reason likely that triceps isolation exercises, and especially overhead ones are really good for the triceps is because the long head does not just extend the elbow, it’s also helping the lats, including the elbow, back down to your body. It’s a shoulder extensor. So this means that for doing a bench press exercise you are extending the elbow, but you’re also flexing the shoulder.

If the long head of the triceps this part would be contracting, if this would be contracting maximally, it would help extend the elbow but it would pull back the arm. Therefore the body does not maximally recruit the long head of the triceps, probably during bench presses. And research has found that the long head of the triceps, it’s very poorly stimulated by bench press type exercises. On average in the literature, pushups and bench presses, barbell bench presses even for dumbbells, it’s even worse, stimulates only about half the growth in the triceps as they stimulate in the pecs. So the problem is that that’s by articular muscle conflict of pulling the elbow back. If you’re doing overhead tricep extensions like many people do, which is with a little bit of cheating, if you will, kind of like this, you get to the same problem because the long head, if it would be contracting, be pulling the elbow back down. what you want if you really want to focus on the triceps. get the long head to maximum length, then you need to get your arm all the way overhead and keep it there. You don’t want to do it like this. You want to do it like this.

And anecdotally, I’ve also found that many people report less elbow pain when they hold the arm in place. So when there is more stability during triceps exercises, not so much as in a machine when the movement trajectory is completely fixed, but when the upper arm is fixed in place you can hold it or even put your arm against your head, really fixing the arm so that you can purely focus on the triceps extension movement. Again using an off-hand grip if needed. You want to get your hands behind your body to really close the elbow angle and get full range of motion. This is probably the best way to stimulate your triceps.

For the biceps. Many people frame their biceps primarily with dumbbell and barbell curls. That is traditionally the way because that’s the equipment we had. However, I think we can do a bit better even if we only have dumbbells and barbells. So a standard dumbbell curl, which you would do like this has a big problem in that in the bottom of the movement, gravity is pulling the weight straight down and there is no demand for elbow flexion. The biceps is moving the weight up like this and gravity’s pulling down, so the biceps in this position are essentially relaxed. There’s no muscle tension on there. That’s also a problem if you do incline curls. Many people do incline curls because it stretches the biceps. The biceps extends over the shoulder. So if you put the elbow behind the body it stretches the biceps more. That is true. But in the standard incline. Cruel side movement, again, the arm is vertical in the bottom position, so while the muscle is lengthened, it’s not actually under tension.

So if you want high tension at long muscle lengths, which is probably ideal for the biceps, because even if you don’t put any stock in the stretch-mediated hypertrophy stuff, there is more active tension in the biceps as well. Because the biceps is relatively unique as a muscle, based on its operating sarcomere lengths, we know that the biceps produces the most access internal force, not just passive tension, but also active tension when it’s that long muscle lengths.

So what you want to do is either you do a very, very inclined curl so that you end up in kind of this position. Which would look something like this. So now in the bottom position, my arm is still not fully horizontal because my shoulder is maximally stretched. And then you could do an incline curl like this. That would be good. If you don’t want to do this set up, or if you just want an alternative exercise, which you can also do if you prefer to keep standing. Is to do a standing dumbbell curl, but with the elbows pressed forward onto your body. Put the elbows on your hip bones and then you do dumbbell curls like this. Now you also have tension in a bottom position.

The nice thing about this exercise, if you’re short on time, what I sometimes like to do is to finish the exercise up like this. You can go to failure or however close you want, and then go into a mechanical drop set and continue the exercise with regular dumbbell curls. And then after you hit failure again, you can keep going with one arm at a time until you again his failure. This takes advantage of the bilateral deficit, which is defining that if our body does something with two arms at the same time, it cannot coordinate the movement as effectively as with one arm at a time. And therefore we are stronger with one dumbbell than with two dumbbells. You can easily test this for yourself if you do dumbbell curls to failure with two arms, drop one of the dumbbells even if it’s your weaker arm, you can still keep going. You can still probably do a few repetitions because the body has an easier time producing force with just one arm at a time.

Another tip to get a bigger biceps is to do concentration curls with a backwards lean. So do like Fat Joe said Lean back. Lean back. So most people do their concentration curls like this. And that’s okay. it will certainly work. All of the exercises that I’ve talked about in this video, will be effective. we’re talking about optimization here. What you can do to get the muscle at high tension in the long lengths is to lean back, use your leg as a fulcrum, now you’ll see that there is high tension in the biceps in the bottom position, because the arm is not vertical. For most free weight exercises, when you’re training arms, you don’t want your arms to be vertical in the bottom position, because then there will be no muscle tension. Then you do the exercise like this.

So give these tips a try and let me know what you think. If you like this type of content, I’d be honored. If you like us, subscribe.