The Biceps Training Revolution (MUCH Better Exercises Explained)

Dr Mike's smart and makes up exercises of his own and he's Avant guard and he's a revolutionary and isn't he great curls I prefer to use the whole name otherwise it's rude hey folks Dr Mike here for RP strength and today's topic is about as the French say h maybe they're not in the mood for it anymore the French have an interesting history with Revolution and so do I how come Dr Mike why did are you talking about I have personally experienced a revolution in my biceps training and as far as revolutions go bicep training

revolutions are really important we got the United States revolutionary war against the oppression of the English that's right here the bicep Revolution right just beneath an importance but very important French Revolution greatly forward China That's somewhere down there in an irrelevant Place compared to your biceps so what the hell was this Revolution and could you stand to benefit from a revolving with me yes as a matter of fact your next assignment is to go watch the entire last part of the trilogy Matrix Revolutions now that you're back and hate yourself because that movie was terrible

and went nowhere let's talk about biceps here's how I used to train them what I'm going to tell you may not be controversial at all I used to do cable curls I used to do barbell curls easy curls dumbbell curls all combinations of variations thereof and I did most of them standing because real men stand when they curl so I thought and working on my way at the time to becoming a real man I thought such things were important now I did the things I trained the biceps and as you can probably tell I trained

them in a way that's oddly not unique and similar to how 90% of people train their biceps here were my results and experiences i g gained a lot of axial fatigue from standing axial fatigue is fatigue generated by the tension required to keep your spine upright and anytime you have tension through the spine or tension to curve the spine axial fatigue accumulates it's the kind of fatigue that means your squats are still doing well but after a bunch of deadlifting you try to pick up the bar and even bending over is hard you can barely

pick up anything you're like I don't know my legs feel fine my arms feel fine my back if I had to do pull-ups or rows feels fine but does something just feeling it's crushing me and I hate it and it lasts a while here's the thing bicep curls are not very heavy but if you stand up to do all of them especially as you Arc the curls out in front of you your back has to lean back for you activating the spinal erector musculature for me I literally got low back pumps midback pumps and it

would definitely fatigue me and it was a at best it was a nuisance I was like damn it man like these curls beat my ass not even locally just systemically from the axal fatigue perspective more than I was interested in admitting and the stimulus to fatigue ratio thus for almost all curls if you include axial fatigue for me was just not that great so I was putting in a lot of work I wasn't getting a ton out of it it gets worse axial fatigue is dope if at least the raw stimulus magnitude is very high

so if you're trying to grow for example huge legs and you're doing heavy squats which have a lot of axial fatigue generated I mean deep squats will grow big ass legs period the problem with me is that my raw stimulus is you know very very high for legs on the squats but while I had decent fatigue in my biceps of various curls just there wasn't a lot happening the stimulus proxies weren't shouting at me all the time in just a few sets my tension perceiving my tension in the bicep was like tension especially at the

top I don't know the bottom where i' Lov some tension where it's a deep stretch I don't really feel any the burn was pretty cool at higher reps but it would burn for just a second or two and then I'd have to put the weights down because I couldn't get a full range of motion anymore because the middle part is the sticking point so not even as much burn as I would have liked the pumps were de I guess but like i' I really almost never had what I call an amazing bicep pump up until

La Revolution which I will describe shortly and it was kind of like blar man almost never got delayed on set muscle soreness and it's kind of like in my triceps in my chest in my quads in my lats muscles that grow more easily for me and I've been characteristically more impressive on my physique they all get all these tension and is crazy the burn is crazy the pump is crazy the delayed onset muscle soreness is crazy and it just wasn't for these bicep movements so even the raw stimulus magnitude which would be worth the fatigue

if it was high it wasn't even high so really not ideal and I noticed like I just said earlier I'd have to stop sets due to strength deficit at a mid-range I could have done a lot more bottom end partials if I wanted but the problem was even that wasn't cool I'd basically go to failure here and then be like okay I could do like 20 of these but also there's almost no loading at the stretch here at the bottom partials can't be done in name only partials need to be loaded so if you do

partials at a lengthened range which is awesome for growth you have to load that range and as you go lower in the bicep curl standing in any form barbell or cable or easy bar or dumbbell you actually just get less and less tension as you go lower which sucks and it's backwards at at best uh worst backwards at best not remotely ideal so it wasn't uh uh great like I said no huge pumps no target muscle fatigue uh awesome forarm stimulus in some of the barbell curls but like man I'm just not doing these for

forms what the hell am I doing wrong and what I would do is I would do lots of sets of these to make up for the low raw stimulus magnitude because raw stimulus magnitude is how much growth that movement is going to ca for how many sets if it's got a huge raw stimulus magnitude that means it's going to grow a lot in just a few sets I to do a lot more sets to get that total stimulus up to something would actually grow my arms and to believe it or not didn't grow my arms

nearly as much as I would have wanted now a few years back in the last few years I had some experiences in the gym which got me thinking and then I looked at the scientific literature and it got me thinking even more and then I uh unsheathed my sword ran up to the top of an armor personnel carrier in the middle of a capital in Europe and said B and pointed my sword in the sky and of course the my um fellow co- revolutionaries storm the capital uh as all good revolutions end up doing Scott

let's see if we can get ourselves banned on YouTube for this shit like what is he talking about biceps so here's the experience that got me thinking I at first tried to regularly use incline dumbbell curls which do allow you by leaning back to expose yourself at a more lengthened tension position and I loved them and they gave me a little bit of L outset soreness for the first time ever in my biceps they got me big ass pumps I could really feel the attention it was fucking awful in a great way I like okay

this is really awesome then I got my hands on a free motion machine which is one of the greatest machines anyone can have in a gym because it does like a trillion things most of them very well I reversed myself in the free motion machine so I was doing reverse bicep curls on the free motion machine which means I was generating maximum tension at the stretch and then the least amount of tension at the PE contraction and I love these curls even more reliable small amount but reliable delay down set muscle soreness um amazing pumps

amazing tension perception amazing burn very little elbow uh I mean I never really got any kind of connective issu problem with regular curls but these were just awesome on my elbows too even more so and I'm like holy crap like it's weird for me as Mr barbells and free weights and all that stuff something I used to identify with a bit more in my past it's weird for me to be the guy that's like yeah like the free motion machine is just Superior for training biceps for me seemingly categorically that was strange to accept but

it was a reality I had to accept preconceived notions don't get you jacked do an effective shit gets you jacked Scott you looking around a lot what wrong you good fuck is wrong with you I'm trying to make money out here for us baby you out here doing nonsense trying to get in my way swear to God folks we're looking for a new video guy your name has to be Scott and you have to be literally Scott the video guy but if you're that guy show up to work goddamn it all right now recently just

a couple months ago I tried a new exercise which looks weird it looks weird and you have to lie down on the ground at the gym I know strange but people already do that for push-ups and crunches why not for another exercise I started doing lying cable curls now lying cable curls don't really do a ton for generating a ton of tension uh generating a ton of tension of the stretch so they don't do that a ton they don't do the long muscle length thing super well but because you're lying down your spine no longer

has to support your body weight plus the weight of the curl it just supports the weight of the curl and I got to tell you you don't curl that much neither do I so it feels way more amazing so I was able to with lying curls take that axial fatigue and just almost eliminate it which was like wow like I can do lots of sets of curls now one of the things I like to do with curls is my rep match sets get 20 reps close to failure on your first set in the next two

or three or four sets how many sets you have programmed for that day you do as many my rep approaches to failure as it takes to get 20 total reps in each set it could be like 20 in the first one in the second one is 12 then rest then six then rest then two then you're done rest for a minute or two and then you go again 20 however many little mini breaks you need getting close to failure resting five to 10 seconds and going with axial movements like barbell and dumbbell curl standing curls

actually gets really old really fast you're standing around for a long time and a bunch of that's curling a bunch of that's just standing and maybe you can sit for 5 to 10 seconds but really is nowhere to sit there's no consolation it sucks but with line curls myups super fucking easy because you just rack the weight you're seated up for a second 5 to 10 seconds later you grab the weight you lean back and then you go again the amount of systemic fatigue cardiovascular fatigue neurological fatigue that you accumulate curling and a lying position

is way way way lower it's just lower than standing but if you think it through the objective stimulus to the biceps is either the same or because you're much more relaxed and much more energetic even Superior to standing curls in which you have to contend with two things one is staying erect which can be hard for a lot of folks Scott I wish we had a pills to promote as one of our sponsors on this channel because what hell of an ad transition right there that we missed any case get your shit sorted but you

may find that the lying cable curl is just Superior because once the axal fatigue is essentially removed man the shit just gets better kind of all around now most recently it's been kind of a three-part Journey incline dumbbell curls I was like okay free motion and I was like okay sorry four-part Journey part three was lying cable curls and I was like why didn't I think of this earlier this is dumb obviously other people have thought of this I have not invented any exercises here folks but it it's kind of just trying to stick to

traditional movements and tradition leads to two things sometimes really awesome things that we miss and sometimes really terrible things that we uh thank God every day are not around anymore old style curling might be a little bit of both but maybe more of the latter for me than I wanted to admit most recently my most recent thing that kicked off Revolution and made me have a an idea to make this video for you guys is that I tried weeks ago lying dumbbell curls now this exercise looks arguably as absurd as uh lying cable curls but

you lie down on a bench maybe you put the seat of the bench up just a little bit to give yourself kind of a little pillow maybe not and you just lie down and you can really spread your arms as wide or narrow as you you like but as long as they clear the bench narrow is fine and a curl grip you take dumbbells and you curl all the way down maybe even gently touching the ground and waiting for a second and curl all the way up I did this and after two sets I got

delayed onset muscle soreness that lasted for three days in my biceps which to me happens once every five years and I was like yeah okay this is amazing humongous pump just unreal tension just all the best things but I was like yeah okay novelty is a thing so maybe the Doms won't come back and it'll just be another great exercise I did it again and again and again and every single fucking time two to three my match sets I got delayed onset muscular soreness and a few other folks of mine that uh I correspond with

on the internet some would call them friends but I believe Mr Nick shop pays these people to interact with me other bodybuilders and such they've experiment experimented as well with the lying dumbbell curls and they're like bro bro the shit is fire as fuck and I'm getting reliable to lay onsite muscle soreness which I believe has something to do with growth but at the very least it can tell us about growth that look doing more probably not the answer doing less could be the answer but this is definitely a robust stimulus if something gets you

sore for three or four days repeatedly over and over you 99 problems but stimulating the muscle is absolutely not one of them for me it was such a big deal for biceps had a really hard time getting in there and stimulating that at some point if I find an exercise like this that works so well I'm like holy sh this makes stuff really really interesting and the raw stimulus magnitude for these things are crazy it's like hamstrings uh raw stimulus magn is stiff like a deadlifts like you do two three sets and you're completely fucked

up amazing stimulus to fatigue ratio as well there's no joint stuff joints feel totally fine uh heads up if you want to try this exercise make sure your shoulder joints are in good working order and warm up there's zero spinal loading by definition because you're lying down there are really no synergist muscles maybe front Delta is kind of a static stabilizer maybe a little bit of a dynamic stabilizer but as far as uh most Prime movers are concerned it's really just your foreign flexors mostly are biceps and this is a big deal this is a

big deal that means this exercise you do it and you're like it feels hard for the biceps do really feel hard for anything else a set or two later you're like dude holy fucking shit I'm pumped out of my mind what the hell is going on and they're like oh that was cool and you go home and you wake up the next day you're like holy shit all biceps are sore and it happens over and over it's unbelievable so I said two things earlier one had some personal experience Revelations lately or over the past several

years and then two I looked at the science again as we tend to do and the recent accumulated data on range of motion say a couple things they pretty unequivocally say the top end partials if you're just going to do curls from here to here they suck they're the worst possible kind of training so that blows now also this recent training says that full range of motion is fine it's totally cool but but part at a bottom end range are fucking dope they work but they don't work as well everywhere because if you're doing partials

in a bottom range on a standing bicep curl you're essentially in the range in which the loading is kind of nominal at most of the time and the more of a stretch you get the less load you get kind of cancels itself out so there's a better way to think about this it is yes the bottom end partials work great but what really is the fundamental underlying thing that works is generating High degrees of muscle tension at a lengthened muscle position versus a shortened muscle position so that means emphasizing the literal stretch and exercis is

awesome but where tension occurs at the stretch if you think about a pull-up right uh a normal pull-up at the very bottom when you're hanging you can feel that shit ripping your lats open amazing but like at the bottom of a barbell curl you're like feel my biceps I could just stand here forever my biceps aren't even sort of involved but if you're on the bot of a very deep incline curl if you're in a free motion curl for sure if you're in a lying dumbbell curl not only do you get the mega stretch but

you get crazy tension the craziest tension of the movement typically around that stretch area that keeping the most of the training at long muscle lengths and even if the very top part of the movement you don't do or the very top part's easy and then you do the hard stuff and the top part's easy you do the hard stuff either way you get amazing results this way it is just Superior from all the laboratory evidence in terms of growth so I had this personal experience so we knew theoretically that long muscle lengths and stretch underload

was a thing that probably caused hypertrophy in animals and in humans from older modeling so we knew that and we had never skipped the stretch in the gym but recently when I've emphasized long muscle length training through these new bicep exercis in the gym and reducing axial fatigue and stuff like that I just noticed way better results and taking another look at the accumulated literature I was like okay now it's really really obvious that stretch underload is a really really big deal man it all kind of comes together and makes a lot of sense so

here's how I train my biceps now and how you might uh want to take some stuff from this though don't leave just yet because at the end of this video I have recommendations separately for beginners intermediates and advanced folks who want to try out this stuff so the main concept of how we lift now is kind of can be summarized in three things first make sure that the tension in your bicep training or I make sure that the tension in my bicep training is there at long muscle lengths if I don't get decent tension at

long muscle links in an exercise it doesn't mean it's off the table it means I might try to replace it with an exercise that can accommodate that I also pick movements that are not only the the exposing the muscle in the lengthened position but are also the toughest into lengthened position so that when the muscle gets really close to failure it's in that lengthened position it's in that most growth promoting position that you get close to failure which probably means more growth is had and there's an objective sense in which you're like well I'm failing

in the hardest part that makes sense that's easy to track and so on and so forth It's failing in the easiest part which kind of weird and you're like could I tried harder Etc and I also try to maximize good God I said that backwards thank God I corrected myself I try to minimize my axial fatigue as much as possible so if I'm standing I sit if I'm sitting I incline if I'm inclining I lay down not exactly like that but you guys get the drift if there's a way to do an exercise which reduces

your actual fatigue go from standing to sitting and sitting to lying down in any capacity is generally can be a big advantage in a program especially if you're big and strong and you train your leg in your back and you can't just piss away axial fatigue into the wind although urinating into the wind is fun someone's downwind if it's you that's downwind it's not so fun no I'm not speaking of personal experience of course I've never urinated in public you believe that do you believe that about yourself mhm some example lifts that I do we

got line cable curls so as you can tell the setup here is you fucking put some dumbbells on your feet so you could have something to press from that you still get tension at the bottom stretch you lie down on the ground like an animal facing up you get whatever kind of curl Implement is uh convenient and fun for you and makes your wrist and elbows feel okay you just Jam away that's really really good incline dumbbell curls of course A classic I would say the lower that incline is generally the better you feel the

more tension at a stretch we have the option of free motion curls of course which are always great you can do these with a regular cable stack but free motion you have so much control over where you put the arms and where you position the the situation it's really a big benefit my recommendation of free motion curls is to get the uh bottom position so that your pulley is roughly at hand length when you drop your hands down so that the pulley is perpendicular to your hand at the very bottom and that means you get

massive stretch and tension at the same time and it gets much easier as you curl up which is the ideal Force curve seemingly for hypertrophy training then I've been messing with some concentration curls but not Arnold style Mano henselman style in which you lean back on purpose as you're doing them so that you expose yourself to tension and long muscle links it's really really awesome and of course my new patented uh lying dumbbell curls or as I like to start calling them from now on Dr Mike's smart and makes up exercises of his own and

he's Avant guard and he's a revolutionary and isn't he great curls I prefer to use the whole name otherwise it's rude those exercises give those a shot they are um exercises you can do in the RPI hypertrophy app there is no avoiding hard training if you want to grow but if you want to grow the most your training needs to be hard and smart RP hypertrophy app will make sure you're progressing on track monitoring and adjusting your workout at all times so for all that work you're doing you can be sure you're getting the best

results so if you want a bicep specialized program put together you can do that in there absolutely no problem we have a couple of exercises already or a couple of programs in their arms emphasis so you can sprinkle in your new curl exercises there and uh give some of these a try uh big reminder it's not good versus evil it's not terrible versus ideal as far as exercise selection it's good versus better barbell curls will slap beef onto your fucking arms bro they just will but you might have a little bit more beef if you

use some of these other interesting curl varations so give those a shot but before you run away if you're a beginner don't run too far because my recommendation here for beginners is to stick mostly to multi-joint moves like underhand rows pull-ups and pull downs and upright rows you can throw in some curls of any kind if you want but you really would not bother with this sfr nonsense because that's nonsense that's only really relevant for people of a high training age you've been training up to about three years do compound full range of motion badass

exercises throw some curls in the mix there's no right or wrong in any case just use good technique progress your loading slowly and you'll be 100% fine you don't hardly even need to do isolations for biceps for intermediates you want to try all kinds of curls because some people really respond amazingly to barbell curls and easy curls they didn't have you know I used to have a time where months on end easy standing bar Easy Bar curls were fucking butter and they worked really well and I really like them so absolutely do all the kinds

of curls these kinds the new ones that I talked about the old school ones try them both and pay attention to the raw stimulus magnitude like how much oomph do they really give your biceps for a certain number of sets but also the stimulus to fatigue ratio like for the oomph are you really tired do your joints hurt if your joints don't hurt much or at all you're not really tired and there's a lot of oomph that's kind of the Golden Fleece as you're intermediate you should collect these Golden Fleece exercises for yourself so that

you know which ones work best for you and then if you're Advanced when you're Advanced my main points for you are twofold one consider biasing most of your curls to the stretch position which uh pretty much most of these ones that I've shared today do and find out what typically are the four five best stimulus to fatigue ratio variants in curling for you stick mostly of those it could be very different than it is for other people but you have to always combine General Science and Theory with your own personal experience to get right in

that little middle ven diagram situation that's amazing for you and folks go out there get big arms and make some goddamn friends which is easy when you have big arms see you guys next time [Music]