A science-backed bicep routine using EMG research to build muscle. Start with heavy chin-ups for type II fibers, then incline curls for the long head, concentration curls for the short head, and reverse-grip curls for the brachialis. Three sets each, 6-8 reps.
Foreign I think we can all agree that a physique just isn't complete without full, well developed three dimensional arms. Yet you rarely see individuals who have actually achieved this feat and this is likely due to deficiencies in their arm training. In part one of this video I'm going to discuss the best exercise routine for the biceps and based on the analysis of several studies and our anatomical understanding of the arms and in order to learn how to best train your biceps, it's vital that you first understand their anatomy. The biceps is a two headed muscle consisting of a long head and a short head and their individual growth will depend heavily on your exercise selection, as you'll see in this video. Another muscle that tends to be forgotten is the brachialis which lies beneath the biceps and assists in flexing at the elbow and when well developed it can actually push your biceps up more to provide a better peak when flexing as well as provide more separation between the biceps and triceps. So in order to best train your biceps, you want to choose exercises that will allow growth in both the long and short head of your biceps as well as the brachialis. You may be wondering what chin ups are doing in an arm routine, but in my opinion they are one of the best exercises to grow your biceps and scientific literature seems to agree with this. For example, this 2014 study by the American Council on Exercise compared EMG activation of the biceps with seven different exercises. As you can see in the graph above, the chin up was tied for second for activation of the biceps and managed to outperform traditional bicep exercises like the barbell curl or easy curl. And the reason I'm opting to start with chin ups for biceps as opposed to concentration curls which perform better in terms of activation is one because it's a compound movement and two because research like this study by Hughes et al has shown that the biceps are comprised of mostly type 2 muscle fibers which best respond to training with heavy weight. In fact, one study by Legally et al. Found that each jump in relative load going from 30 to 90% of one rep max resulted in more bicep activation, meaning that in order to recruit all the motor units of your bicep you need to use heavy weight. And since you can easily overload chin ups with weight and work up to very heavy loads with it, I suggest starting your biceps workout with them and going heavy for fairly low reps. This second exercise will be used to put more emphasis on the long head of your biceps, but keep in mind that both heads will always be activated to an extent during any elbow flexing movement. But the reason it emphasizes the long head more is because when you perform a curl, when on an incline, your shoulder is put into a hyperextended position, so it stretches the long head of the biceps which runs over the shoulder joint. And since the long head is placed in a greater stretch position compared to the short head, it's now able to reduce more force. And as demonstrated in this study by Oliveira et al. The long head will be active throughout the whole range of motion rather than just the beginning or just the end, which is the case for many biceps exercises like preacher curls. This next exercise will be used to put more emphasis on the short head of the biceps. I chose to include this exercise because, as we saw earlier in this study, the concentration curl elicited much higher bicep activation than the seven other bicep exercises. And the reason it puts more emphasis on the short head of the biceps as opposed to the long head is because, as shown in this study by Sodman et al. Activation of the short head of the biceps is is maximized with combined flexion and supination. So you want to turn your wrist out during every rep in order to fully activate the short head of your biceps. And another great thing about this exercise is that it minimizes the involvement of the anterior delts, which often come into play during curling exercises. In fact, the study I previously showed by the American Council of Exercise not only showed that the concentration curl had the greatest bicep activation, but the activation of the anterior delt was significant, significantly lower during this exercise than all of the other bicep exercises. This is likely because during this movement the humerus is pressed against the leg and it doesn't allow the upper arm to sway, which helps fully isolate the biceps. One researcher also noted that there may be something mental going on as well. The fact that you can visually see your biceps working throughout the movement may in fact help with this mind to muscle connection with your biceps. You want to use this last exercise to help target the brachialis and the brachioradialis, which are muscles that will help a lot in improving the aesthetics of your arm. The reason I chose easy bar curls with a reverse grip is because brachialis inserts onto the ulna rather than the radius, simply meaning that it only has one purpose and that is to flex the arm. Since it has no role in supinating the wrist like the biceps do, flexing the arm with a pronated grip will shift some of the work away from the biceps and onto the brachialis which otherwise gets taken taken over by the biceps during regular curling exercises, which has actually been proven in various EMG studies like this one by NATO et al. That's basically it for the video guys. I hope you enjoyed it. I suggest that you perform three sets of each of the exercises that I showed and also perform them in the order that I presented them in. You want to train heavy for a fairly low rep range of around 6 to 8 reps as this will allow you to fully recruit all of the water units of your biceps. So if you like my video and found it useful, then please do me a favor and support me by liking the video, leaving a comment down below as to what you found useful and what you liked about the video. And also as always, please don't forget to subscribe to my channel and turn notifications on for my channel as well as this will all really help me out. You may have noticed that this is part one of two for the ARMS video, so next week I'm going to be following up and releasing a triceps portion of it. So I highly suggest you check that out and when it's up I'll put the link right here and you can also check it out in the link in the description box down below when it's ready. That's it for today guys. I'll see you next time.
