 Ladies and gentlemen, Silent Mike back with another video. Before we hop into the video, I want to give a little bit of announcement. For those that don't know, I have a new podcast that drops every single Wednesday called 50% Facts. In each episode, we try to tackle one topic, one question, and in the first portion of the episode, me and Jim McDee, my old time podcast and partner, we explore it, we ask questions without doing any research. And then in the second half, we call in one of the world's leading experts on the topic to give you the exact answers to give you 100% of the facts. Again, it's every Wednesday, but we just launched the YouTube channel. So if you guys want to go on the audio, if you guys like listening on the audio, be sure to check that out. It's on all platforms, drops every Wednesday. I don't know what episode we're on, but we started like beginning of the year. So a lot of episodes, but the visuals are in. So my YouTube friends, link in the bio, check it out, 50% Facts YouTube channel. All the updated stuff will be there plus all the new ones coming. I really appreciate it. Today we're going to dive into how to build some biceps. Not the biggest arms, but they ain't bad. How to build your arms before we dive in, give this thing a thumbs up. New videos Monday, Wednesday, Saturday. I appreciate you. I really appreciate you fam. We're killing it, you're killing it. The support is outrageous. Let's dive in. So we're talking about exercise variation, which we have over the past couple of weeks in powerlifting. We're normally trying to address some kind of weakness, whether it's a rage of motion weakness or something in one of your lifts. A way to continue progress without just hammering yourself over and over with the competition lifts or potentially to take a little break to handle less load or build some hypertrophy in some different movements. So you do close grip bench to build a little bit more triceps or lockout power, et cetera, et cetera to continue the progress. Cause if we're just benching all the time, sometimes it's hard to add volume. We're talking about bodybuilding. Now I'm no bodybuilder, but your boy does lift some weights for a long time. And look, I'm not jacked, 200 pounds. I don't know what my body fat percentage is, but I've built some also over the years and I've been lucky enough to hang out with some of the best IFBB type bodybuilders and some of my boys who are the best natty boys in the world. Eric Helms, Alberto Nunez, even my boy and Seema, very, very jacked individuals without any performance enhancing drugs. So I've gathered a lot of knowledge. I've applied it a lot to myself. And when you are powerlifting, obviously some hypertrophy work is very important. Now biceps, maybe not the most functional for powerlifting specific, but they do allow you to just handle more loads. They're obviously a de-accelerator in some of the movements and they allow more stability and kind of the more stability and kind of the elbow region when you're benching. It never really hurts. Plus some of the pulling motions itself. But everybody, whether you, if you want to look like you work out, you got to build some biceps. The hamstrings of the arms, it's got to be there. So like everything in hypertrophy, we want to go from the heaviest, most compound movements, meaning more joints. You're using more than one joint in a compound movement all the way down to the isolation. The fact is to build any muscle, we're going to need a good amount of frequency, a good amount of volume, and we're going to have to take that thing to a higher RPE. We want to take it near failure multiple times a week. And especially with a smallish muscle like the bicep, it's going to be fairly easy to train this thing and recover from it. So you can really pound these things with volume most of the time, depending on your overall goal. But if your goal is to build the bicep and have no worries, recover pretty easy. All rowing movements are going to help. The chin up, I love building my back and biceps together just because you get a nice little warmup in your elbows and some blood in your biceps before going into isolation movements. Sometimes when you have wear and tear or you've just been lifting for a very long time. Doing curls, cold, it takes me a long time to warm up my elbow joints and even my wrist to feel good. But after doing a couple sets of pull-downs, pull-ups, rows, kind of the typical movements, feel really, really good. Obviously it's not the number one bicep builder, depending on your genetics, depending on your mechanics. Some people do build pretty impressive biceps in terms of definition and even how big they are, just doing compounds. A lot of people row really, really heavy, chin up, et cetera, et cetera, and get some really nice biceps, which I did for a very long time when I was more focused on powerlifting. I probably did four or five sets of biceps a week. And they're just kind of hammer crows to really finish off an upper body session. But majority of myself was bent over rows, dumbbell rows, chest supported rows, chin ups and pull-ups. But now that my goals are a little bit more balanced out, I want to kind of look good, feel good, move good, I put a lot more time in the biceps just because I enjoy it as well. So the two main movements we have to kind of get involved there are some kind of supination, right? Pulling our pinkies up, palm towards the sky, that's going to be one mover of the bicep itself. And then obviously the curl is the main isolation we're using, but two main types are having your elbow kind of in front of your body, something like a preacher curl or even a concentration curl on your leg. And then the other one would be elbows more at your hip. A lot of our musculature and kind of the mechanics of it make it simple enough that these exercises can be broken down that easy. Same as like the calf, you do a standing movement and you do a bent movement and you hit the majority of the angles you need on your calf muscles. Now, why do people, the IFBBs in particular, they get all these weird machines and cables and this exercise and it looks all special? The beauty of bodybuilding is you can get creative and do a bunch of variations in the lift, but the main goal isn't to focus on like a weakness or overload or something of that nature. The focus is can you feel the bicep and is it a healthy movement for you and how you're built? For some people, maybe the concentration curl, they just don't feel it in their bicep and they feel it in their shoulder. Then throw that one out, go to a machine preacher, try a free weight preacher, try a cable preacher, whatever it might be, you can kind of mix those up until you find a group of lifts and this goes for all hypertrophy work, really. You find a group of lifts that feel good mentally and physically, you can really feel that muscle working and then you can focus on the overload, the working close to failure, really causing that suckers and fatigue and building volume and even strengthen those movements over time. For me, I'm pretty lucky the bicep feels really good. I don't really enjoy barbell movements. One, because of the symmetry, but two, because it hurts my wrists and shoulders, just not that mobile. So I stick to dumbbells and machines and even when I do a machine or a cable, I like to do them one handed, just feels really good. I do a hammer curl. That's a great movement for me because it kind of emphasizes the strength stuff. It does work the brachialis and your grip a little bit, but it just feels good mentally and physically to handle some heavier loads. So one day a week, I'm handling heavier loads with a hammer curl and then lighter weights with a supinating preacher. I like to do it on a machine or even sometimes a preacher pad, but it depends on the pad. I like a little bit better angle. Today I didn't have one with the content you're seeing, but depending on the gym I'm at, I like to do that. And the other day I either like to do a seated or standing just supinating curl, mixed in with a cable curl with my palms up already supinated. Frequency, overall volume, it will depend on how advanced you are, but again, if a hypertrophy is your number one goal for your biceps, you might be able to hit those guys three, four times a week. Even potentially, shout out to my man Eric Helms who trains kind of similar to me. We train kind of full body very often right now because I'm taking a small break from weightlifting because I hurt my knee a little bit, just giving that thing room to breathe. I'm going back to a little bit more of a power lifting split, but I'm mostly just doing a push pull with a little bit deadlifts involved. But otherwise, I was basically doing a full body where you kind of do one exercise or so per body part, per day, and then the exercise vary in intensity. You know, you're not always maxing out the heavy fives on squats. Some days you might do a single leg, sometimes it's body weight, whatever it might be. But the bicep, you could really hit two to three exercises, probably three or four times a week, depending on how advanced you are, varying those slightly, but keeping them the same on the days, if that makes sense. You don't want to just vary exercises for the sake of varying exercises. You want to keep a certain stack of exercises for a training block, maybe four, eight, 12, maybe even more weeks if you're progressing in them. And so every Monday I'm doing the hammer curl, if that makes sense, and every Wednesday I'm doing the supinating, preacher curl, et cetera, et cetera. And you want to keep those steady so that you can continue to progress. How many sets? Again, it will depend on how advanced you are and how much volume you might need to grow. Personally, because I'm doing it more frequently, and I'm in a slight calorie deficit, I'm not looking to really blow up any kind of size. I do one to three really hard sets, grinding out a couple reps at the end. Again, go back to the other videos, we talked about kind of grinding out reps and maybe a power lift opposed to maybe grinding out reps in a weight lift, which you can't really do, but bodybuilding movements are very, very different. One, the goal is different when you're doing a bodybuilding movement, purely hypertrophy. And the goal in the powerlifting is to find a groove to find some speed plus the overall load, right? If I'm grinding out a 25 pound dumbbell on a preacher curl versus grinding out a 500 pound squat, the overall systemic fatigue is gonna be very, very different in what it might lead to, the training for the rest of the week. Hopefully that makes sense. Find a good amount of exercises. Do them very frequently. Find exercises that not only feel good on your joints, on your mind, you have fun with and feel good and you can really feel that muscle. Rinse and repeat. Get some biceps. Leave your comments below. What questions do you want me to cover in upcoming videos? I really do appreciate you guys. I'm off. Silent Mike. Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, new videos. I'm out.