Today, I'm trying to tell you everything I know about concentration curls.
So it's a bicep exercise, one bicep at a time.
We have a general principle of the program, any time that you can work one side and then
the other, and both sides at the same time, you want to do both.
Any time you can work one side and then the other side, and then both sides at the same
time, you want to do both.
So this is an example of working the right bicep and the left bicep.
This is my right and this is my left.
I hope it works out for you too.
Alright, so I'm going to warm up, and as you should always do, the greatest warmup is the
first exercise of your workout.
So it's the warmup for the whole workout, but then every exercise after that has its
own warmup.
A warmup has a basic definition, a general definition, and that is it is light or easy,
slow, very intentional, and you try to do it very precisely and move forward.
So that your body gets used to doing it.
It's actually your brain that we're trying to warm up the most, so think about that.
So I'm going to get that dumbbell and I'll tell you some other form-based things in
just a second.
I am trying to connect in terms of feel, I'm trying to connect with what the bicep is doing.
Do some on the other side.
Doesn't matter what size dumbbell you use.
This is a 10-pound dumbbell.
The whole purpose of this is it's the only way to exercise muscle, and muscle is what
we're mostly made of.
Most of our tissue is muscle.
All of our metabolism is in muscle.
I hope you've heard about the mitochondria.
It's a famous little organelle inside each muscle cell.
This is the only way to maintain every aspect of the muscle cell.
So if you want healthy muscle, if you don't have healthy muscle, you're not healthy, but
if you want to be healthy, you have to have healthy muscle, and you have to do individual
muscle exercises.
This is one for the bicep.
I'm going to try to do my next set with a 15.
Before I go, I'm going to tell you some alignment things.
I've watched people do this my entire adult life, and for whatever reason, this one seems
to be a little bit difficult for people to get right away.
But there's some basic geometric things that you want to do.
This thigh, I want to put my elbow to where it doesn't poke into my muscle to the side
of my thigh, so I've got to put it just a little bit lower.
So this function says a wall, so it's like leaning against the wall and doing an exercise.
So the back of my arm is butted up against that wall, but I don't want to push into my
leg with the point of my elbow.
So you just go there every single time, and pretty soon your brain will only do it that
way.
That's the way with all details.
That's why they're important.
And then the other thing is, if you can imagine that elbow is a pointer, it should come to
where the forearm is perpendicular to the thigh.
There's a long bone in the thigh, that's the femur, and then there's two long bones in
the forearm.
They remain perpendicular to the femur, the forearm bones.
Throughout the entire movement pattern are set.
That's one of the things that I see that people have a very hard time doing.
What happens is, when they start working, is this will fall forward, and now that elbow
is going that way, or the opposite.
They'll come over here, and that elbow will be coming in here.
And everything is misaligned and contorted.
You can come up with any words you want, but it's not exactly ideal.
What's ideal is the long bone of our upper arm, there's only one long bone, stays aligned
with gravity.
That's a vertical line, just like a cord.
It's always going to just hang straight down.
But you have to maintain that, because as soon as you start moving that dumbbell around,
that bone is going to move all around.
It's actually you that's moving around, your upper body and stuff like that.
Because you're so working that your brain is recruiting every imaginable muscle that
can help.
Your upper back, and your shoulder will lean back, and I'm sure you'll see me do that as
I continue to warm up, but I'm going to try not to.
I'm going to try to maintain my alignments.
That felt really good.
Put that bone of the elbow slightly below that thigh, keep my shoulder right over the
elbow.
Let's move on to something else.
From the top of the movement, the top of the movement has a dead end.
There's a gazillion definitions here, and it's my job to say them to you.
The top of the movement, the arm is bent as much as it can bend.
That's a geometric thing.
There it's unbent as much as it can be, the elbow joint.
It's because of the function of the bicep.
If you were to look up in the muscle dictionary, what that muscle does, it would say that it
flexes the elbow.
Flex means bend the arm as much as you can.
Ideally, that's what we want.
If our skeleton was defining whether we have good form or not, we want the arm bones bent
as much as they can at the elbow, and then all the way down.
In the very, very beginning, going all the way down is really, really risky because you're
not strong enough, your infrastructure is not strong enough.
Not just your muscles, but your tendons and your ligaments and your joint capsules and
everything like that just aren't seasoned enough.
They're not mature enough with this form of exercise to handle what's required when you're
all the way at the bottom and then to start back up.
Don't go all the way to the bottom.
What I wanted to cover was, from the top of the movement, arms all the way bent, you want
to feel that the only thing that's supporting the dumbbell as you lower is the bicep.
You have to learn to relax all back here.
That's called your cradle.
It's like the thing that holds the logs in your fireplace.
It's not animated, it's not alive, it just sits there.
As all the rest of your body is like the thing that holds that logs, the only thing that's
alive is that bicep.
From here, every single time you go down, try to feel that it's that bicep only that's
holding that weight.
The bicep gets lengthened on the way down.
That's part of it.
That is its function.
It's going to contract to come back to this position.
Let's call this the starting position for the function of the bicep.
I'm going to lengthen, lengthen, lengthen, lengthen, really back, lengthen, lengthen,
lengthen, lengthen, really back, lengthen, lengthen, lengthen, lengthen, really back.
Now me, I have better connectivity with my left side than my right side.
That's not unusual.
I just know.
You need to know too.
The better you know how well you're connected from side to side or the differences between
your two sides or this muscle or this muscle, the better you'll train yourself, the better
you'll exercise.
You want to regularly review that.
You do that only with consistent exercise.
You do the same exercises month after month and year after year.
They're not an infinite number of exercises for your muscles.
They're all good, by the way.
All strength exercises are good.
I am going to really work to feel this one on that lengthening, lengthen, lengthen, lengthen,
shorten, lengthen, lengthen, lengthen, shorten, lengthen, lengthen, lengthen, shorten, lengthen,
lengthen, lengthen, shorten, lengthen, lengthen, lengthen, lengthen.
The little stuff I'm doing with my hand, that's just stylistic.
It allows me—it's saying to my brain, I'm not using my hand.
I'm not using my grip to bring that dumbbell up.
It's not about my hand.
It's not about the dumbbell.
It's about that bicep.
I'm going back to my good side.
So you can admit that you have a good side or a bad side.
You tell your side that doesn't work as well
to take a lesson from the good side.
Because it's always there while you're doing your good side.
It's just paying attention.
It's like two students.
You love them both.
It's your job to teach them.
Here we go.
See, I didn't go all the way to straight arm.
Because that kind of moved everything.
So I mean, that'll always be there.
You can always go to straight arm, particularly the way
gravity is acting upon that dumbbell.
So you can at any time do that.
But it's kind of safer to go with a cock.
All right, here we go.
And boom, and down, and down, bicep only.
Put that finger right there.
Feeling squeeze, and squeeze, and squeeze.
All righty, you've got to open your legs up.
A lot of people, this is in the way.
So that's a matter of hip joint function
that you can do that.
Don't wear tight jeans.
Last chance for excellence, right here.
You want this shoulder directly over that elbow at all times.
So I need to check and make sure it is.
All right, and squeeze, and squeeze, and squeeze, and squeeze.
All right, that's all we're going to do.
That's called concentration curls, one of the things
that I tease my clients with when I see them not paying
attention when they're doing this exercise,
is why do you think they call it concentration curls?
Next time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
