When you see someone flexing their muscles, your eyes likely automatically go towards their biceps. These are the muscles that pop out the most on your arm, and as a result, a lot of people are looking for ways to increase their mass.
Unlike your triceps, your biceps are what a lot of people focus on when you showcase your gym body in a contest or as an athlete. The question is, how do you increase the size of your biceps? Can you actually get a bigger biceps peak?
The answer is yes! However, it requires you to take a bit of a different approach. Instead of looking at all the different angles you can train your biceps in, or all the new and innovative ways to increase your muscle mass, we want to showcase a different way to push that bicep upwards.
The Middleman in Your Arms
Most people only care about their triceps and their biceps, and don’t pay attention to other muscles in their arms. But those who paid attention in their anatomy classes know that between those muscles there’s actually another muscle.
The muscle wedged between your triceps and your biceps is called the brachialis. It is an almost square-looking muscle that’s anatomically wedged between both muscles when you’re flexing.
Theoretically, if you can build that muscle up, you can push your biceps upward. The main question is, how do you target it?
How to Train the Brachialis
The main issue is that your brachialis and your biceps are both flexors of the elbows, as in they can both grow from the same exercise, and it’s relatively hard to isolate just one of them.
The thing is though, your biceps insert onto your upper forearm bone, called the radius. What that means is, if you turn your forearm towards your body, with your palms are facing downwards, your bicep tendons actually get wedged in between the two forearm bones, the radius and the ulna.
That ends up causing your brachialis muscle to work harder than normal, since the biceps don’t work as well as they should.
Our Recommendations for Increasing Biceps Peak
To push your biceps up, we recommend doing reverse, or neutral circles. So, when you go to the weight room, start with exercises such as hammer curls with a bar or dumbbells. Follow these with reverse curls with a bar or cable, with a focus on doing supersets.
If you’re usually stronger in a neutral motion than you are in reverse, you can start out by doing reverse barbell curls, and then moving on to hammer curls. Keep in mind that all these motions are going to build that brachialis up, and push your bicep peak up, making them appear larger.
We hope this article helped you start using this relatively unknown technique to push your biceps upwards! We’ll see you again when you need any advice.
