How This Skinny Guy Grew His Tiny Arms

From this, to this. What's up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com. So, how did Jesse build up his arms from this little skinny Jesse? Little bitch. He said it, not me. Today I'm going to go over the specific techniques, exercises, and things that we did that I actually coached Jesse through so you can see how to apply it the right way to get the same effect for you. The first thing he did was this. A little bit more flexing. I'm telling you, no matter how experienced you are in the gym, this is a good reminder that a little bit more contracting of the muscles you're trying to build is a great way to build that mind-muscle connection to get better at it. See, here's the thing. You probably, as a kid, spent a little bit of time flexing your arms because it felt good to feel that you're making some progress. But there's a bigger benefit than that. The more you do this, the more of that mind-muscle connection you develop, that allows you to get more out of every exercise that you do. So when you do this, I want you to learn how to do this to the point of flexion discomfort. When you're doing this, can you actually get a cramp to occur in the biceps? When you contract your triceps, can you get a cramp by getting that arm back behind your body? If you do, it's a good sign that you're building the necessary connection to get the most out of your exercises. That said, there is a limit. As you're flexing the arm, you want to build that contraction over a maximum of six seconds. Because beyond that point, you start to fatigue to the point where you really can't effectively recruit motor units to the contraction anymore, and the purpose of this is no longer serving you. In order to build a better mind-muscle connection, try to contract that as hard as you can, progressively over those six seconds – are you enjoying this? JESSE I'm loving this! JEFF Progressively over six seconds, and when you get to the six seconds, you stop. How many times do you do this throughout the day? Honestly, endless amounts of times as a beginner. The more you do this, the more effective you're going to be at recruiting these muscles to what you're trying to do. At the same time, please just be a little bit more discreet than him. You don't have to do this in the gym. The next thing I had to make sure that Jesse wasn't doing, and that you aren't doing, is what I call the hallmark cheat on a curl. If you doubt whether you're doing this or not, all you have to do is either have someone film you, or look in the mirror and focus right here on the elbow. What is it doing during your curls? Most likely it's doing one of two things. Number one, it's doing this, traveling back ever so slightly before you initiate the curl. Don't do that because all this is doing is tricking you into thinking that the weight you're using is something you can actually manage. Again, building off of the last two concepts, you do want to be able to contract the muscle that you're trying to build, and let it also do the work. To do the work of the curl, going backwards just shortens that moment arm, bringing the bar closer to you, and makes you feel as if that weight is lighter. I don't want that because you're taking away from the bicep contribution. Unless you're doing a specifically designed drag curl, which would train the long head, that's a different story. But people don't do that. They do that on regular curls. The second thing they do is, they let the elbows drift far too much in front of their body. Initiating the first movement is, forward movement of the elbow, and then up. Again, this is very nuanced because when you do curl, I'm okay with getting some elevation of the bar at the top because we know that shoulder flexion is one of the components of a properly executed barbell curl. But if it happens right from the beginning, that's not good. The other thing that will happen, hand in hand with these two cheats, is once the bar starts to go out in front of you a little bit, and it starts to follow that longer arc to feel heavier, what happens? We flip the forearms back towards us. We curl the bar towards us because we're trying, once again, to minimize that distance away from the body. That's bad. Instead, you want to bend your wrist backwards as you're curling up to keep the forearms out of it, and focus more of the effort here on the biceps. The same thing would happen if we went back behind us. As we go here, again, you curl to get it closer to you in an effort to continue to lighten that weight. Either one of these is a hallmark mistake. When you curl, make sure you keep that elbow right here, pinned to your body, you curl out in that arc, and that's how you want to perform every, single repetition. Again, you want to add a little bit of flexion at the top just to get more of the shoulders into it, to get that shoulder flexion. That's fine, but make sure you're not making either one of these mistakes. But now, what if your problem, like Jesse's, is that you don't like the way your arms look from the front? Like, you're looking for more thickness. I'm not talking about the arm from this angle here, but literally, when looked at from the front, building up the thickness this way. Well, here you have to start focusing on the brachialis, which is the muscle that lies underneath here. The issue is that, a lot of times, when people do training for the brachialis, they get the other muscles that fatigue first, like the brachioradialis. Jesse, instead, was instructed to do this exercise here, which was the Cable Curl. Now, the Cable Hammer Curl is going to overcome some of the issues that we have with the traditional version of the exercise. See, when I do this exercise here, and I start to pick up the dumbbell, the brachioradialis is doing a lot of the work in the initial portion of the range of motion. That is a weaker muscle than the brachialis, and one that will likely fatigue and cause you to feel like, I can't ever feel the upper brachialis working. All I feel is this getting tired. So, if you do this instead, with cables, we've set it up in a way where the resistance is going to be a little bit lower in the bottom here because the cable is perpendicular to the forearm, but as he starts to curl, it's perpendicular to his forearm at the top, making this exercise most challenging from the neutral position, exactly where we want it to be on the brachialis at the top of the exercise. So, if you are struggling to build some of that upper arm thickness, the best thing you can do is start incorporating some of these same Cable Hammer Curls into your workout routine, and I promise you, you'll start to build up that thickness just like Jesse did. Now, building upon the progress that Jesse made, we had to make sure we continued to build upon the foundation that he built, which means that you've got to keep progressing. A lot of times what I think people do is, A, they forget to keep doing chin-ups because that's one of the best bicep exercises you can do, if you do them the way I'm going to show you here, and the second thing is, you've got to keep progressing on loading this exercise. A lot of times people don't, but Jesse knows you should start adding some weight. I think once you get to the point where you can do even 10 good repetitions of a chin-up, then start adding weight, even if it knocks you back down quite a bit, and build up from there. This is how you can make this a real bicep builder. Now, the point, like I said before, is you don't do it exactly like you do a chin-up that you're doing to try to build your lats. In that case, you'd be staying nice, and close to the bar. But what does staying close to the bar do, besides incorporate the lats? It makes it a little easier for the biceps, for the same reason that keeping that bar close to your body does. So what I want you to do is, not go up as high, but most importantly, maintain distance of your body to your wrists. Keep space away from there. Right to there. So you're basically trying to end in this flexed bicep position. Now, again, this is still even challenging. This is a 25lb plate for Jesse, but he can overload the exercise much more quickly, get to the point where he reaches failure at around 6, 7, or 8 reps, and know that he's given a good exercise choice to keep building those biceps up. You should do the same thing. Oh, shit. There's no way I'm getting back up on this bar. Oh my God, I hammered my callus off. Uh-oh. I think I have to poop. Jeff, hurry up. Hurry up. Now we turn our attention to the triceps and turn back the clock just a little bit to an exercise that's been long ago forgotten, and we need to bring it back. We're talking about the bench dip. You see, this is an exercise that helps Jesse also to build up the width of the arms. So if you're also having a problem with that arm width, you're going to want to make sure you go back to doing this long ago forgotten exercise. The thing that's good about this movement is it gets that long head in that fully contracted position with your arm back behind the body. But when you're doing it, you want to make sure that you're doing two things. Number one, overloading it, if possible. The way to overload it is you take a little plate that's on the bench right next to you, you put it on your lap like this, you put your feet out on another bench, or in this case, a plyo box, and then you allow yourself to drop down and do the repetitions. That being said, the hand placement is really important here, too, because if you want to do this exercise safely, probably some of the reason why people stop doing it is because of what it did to your shoulders. You want to have your hands turned out instead of facing directly towards me. That will actually open up the shoulders a little bit and make the exercise much safer. One last thing, the arc that you follow when you do the exercise, it's not just straight down and up, but it's down at an angle. Down and forward, up and back. If you do the exercise this way, you'll keep your shoulders safe, and most of all, you'll get those triceps growing once again. But when building bigger triceps is your goal, and especially wider, thicker triceps, then it can't just be about the contracted position of the long head. We also want to make sure we're putting it in that stretched position. So a lot of time was spent in these stretched position exercises. So my biggest advice that I gave Jesse and I would give you is, why not just turn some of the repetitions that you do on these sets into one and a half reps? Meaning, don't just go up and down, up and down like Jesse's doing here, but find a way to prolong that stretch a little bit more by going down all the way, up halfway, down again, so you're getting an additional stretch rep on every, single one. If you're having a hard time building your arms, I promise you, it's such an easy tweak. All it takes is just a little extra time on each set, but that time is well worth it. So Jesse was a little bit concerned to show this one, and maybe you out there would, too. Because it involves an exercise that a lot of people hate, but shouldn't. Because it still has merit, and we're talking about the tricep kickback. I understand the limitations of the exercise. People say that when you do it with a dumbbell, there's really no resistance in the first half of the exercise, and when you get to the top, you're really not biomechanically leveraged to do the exercise right. Or they say when you do it with a cable, that when you actually get it to the top of that, you start to lose the resistance right where you actually want it the most. So why not get the best of both worlds? There are ways to engineer exercises to become better, and all I told them to do was just put a band anchored around something low, around the dumbbell, and then do the exercise like that. Because what you'll see here is that you get resistance from the band early on, and you get resistance from the dumbbell here, up at the top. So you get a more smooth resistance curve, and it puts the tricep, once again, in that position, fully contracted, with the arm extended at the shoulder. Again, getting that long head into that fully contracted state. Forgive my limited range of motion, by the way. He's got bone chips in his elbow, right. But the point is, is that it gives you another exercise option, and no, you're not going to load this exercise up with a really heavy weight. You don't have to be that strong to do it. But speaking of, if you want to know how Jesse actually got strong, you're going to want to watch this video right here, and if you want to know how he made this transformation to this big jack guy that you see right now, you're going to watch this transformation video over here. Guys, full programs, exactly the ones that Jesse used, old school iron, and supplements available over at ATHLEANX.com. Click subscribe, turn on notifications, so you don't miss a video when we put one out. See you soon.