Add An Inch To Your Arms

Today I’m going to share with you an exercise that’s going to help you add an inch to your biceps, and I can say that because it’s helped me. My biceps have always been a problem area for me and lately, they’ve been bigger than they’ve ever been because I’ve been attacking them with so much volume and so much weight, that they can’t do anything else besides grow.

Incline Dumbbell Curl

I’ve talked about this exercise a few different times in other videos, and it’s actually going to be a staple exercise in my Cheat & Recover (C&R) program which is coming out very soon. I’ve been teaching this exercise to people in the gym and some clients that I have, and there’s one thing that I notice right away, and that is they’re not overloading properly.

Why Use Cheat & Recover?

The reason we’re doing C&R reps is simple. You’re using cheat reps to overload the muscle with as much weight as possible throughout the 8 repetitions to really spark some muscle growth, and then you’ll immediately do 8 recover reps to fuse more volume into the set. This is for those of you who are like me and you can’t build muscle unless you have a lot of volume in your workouts.

When you do your cheat reps, there is a difference between lifting heavy and OVERLOADING. Lifting heavy means you’re struggling with the weight throughout all your repetitions, usually when you’re doing reps that involve a concentric and eccentric portion. With cheat reps, you’re skipping the concentric portion and just focusing on the eccentric (negative). What that means is you need to grab weight that you can BARELY handle throughout the entire negative.

What Does Proper Form Look Like?

What it’s going to look like is you’ll get into position, lying back on the bench with the dumbbells in the starting position (near your chest/shoulders), and you’re going to fight the negative all the way down. The first repetition should be difficult to do. Once you get to the bottom (make sure you get a full extension), you’re going to lean forward, use momentum to throw the weights back up, and then go into your second rep. Again, you’re fighting the negative as hard as you can, before you get to the bottom and then reset, repeating this 8 times in a row.

The problem is, if you’re not lifting heavy enough, you’re not going to get the kind of muscle fatigue that you really need to get those deep tears in your biceps to spark some growth. Your muscles are 40% stronger during the negative of any exercise that you’re doing. So, if you’re normally doing bicep curls with 30lb, 40lb, or 45lb dumbbells, when you come to this exercise with the slow negatives, you should be grabbing 50lb, 55lb or 60lb dumbbells and really fighting that negative as hard as possible.

Once you finish the first 8 reps, you should pretty much feel fried, that’s how I want you to feel. You shouldn’t finish these 8 reps, throw the dumbbells out of the way and then do your recover set feeling like you have plenty of energy to rep out about 20 reps. The 8 repetitions that you do during the recover should feel just as hard as the 8 repetitions you did for the cheat.

Will This Work If I Am A Hardgainer?

Also, for those of who you have seen my video where I talk about how to build biceps for Skinny Guys / Hardgainers, in that video I talk a lot about trying to build more mind-muscle connection. For those of you who do have poor mind-muscle connection, you don’t really fell the muscle activating during any lift that you do, especially bicep curls. In that routine, there are three different exercises – the first two focus on the stretch and the flex to help you work on your mind-muscle connection, and then you use the incline dumbbell curl for the overload. Once you’re able to establish that strong mind-muscle connection that you need, you can actually take your workout one step further. Instead of doing 3 or 4 exercises per body part, I want you to pick one exercise, this one, utilizing the C&R technique, and instead of just doing 3 sets and moving on, I want you to do JUST this exercise for 10 sets of C&R, and make that your bicep portion of your workout. That’s it, just one exercise!

The reason for this is very simple. When you do an exercise, and you can probably attest to this yourself, usually the first and second set is kind of like getting in the groove of lifting that weight. You’re pushing yourself, but your body is still kind of warming-up, you’re waking up your central nervous system (CNS), and by the time you get to that third set, that’s when you REALLY start to feel it and you start to feel really powerful. But then you finish your third set and you move on. Imagine how much more growth, and how much more potential for lifting heavy you would have if you continue to train your biceps in that same plane of motion, and they become more efficient at that movement. It will allow them to lift MORE weight to help you progress even more and overload even more.

Conclusion

To be honest with you, that’s why I really started to notice growth in my biceps. Instead of bouncing around too many exercises, I’m just sticking to this, and I am CRUSHING it and absolutely loving the results, so I know you will too!