---
title: 'How to Get Wider Arms: The Brachialis Solution'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=BJ6UVAUUJIs'
video_id: 'BJ6UVAUUJIs'
date: 2026-09-06
duration_sec: 468
channel: 'ATHLEAN-X™'
---

# How to Get Wider Arms: The Brachialis Solution

> Source: [How to Get Wider Arms: The Brachialis Solution](https://youtube.com/watch?v=BJ6UVAUUJIs)

## Summary

This video addresses the common issue of arms lacking width, explaining that the brachialis muscle is the key to solving it. The presenter shares personal experience, including a bicep injury, and provides specific exercises and programming tips to target the brachialis effectively.

### Key Points

- **Brachialis is the key to width** [00:41] — The brachialis muscle is the primary driver of arm width, not the biceps. It sits underneath the biceps and pushes it up, adding both width and height.
- **Grip and forearm position** [02:33] — To target the brachialis, use a pronated grip and keep the forearm in a neutral or pronated position to minimize biceps involvement.
- **Cross-body hammer curl** [02:58] — The cross-body hammer curl is a variation that shifts more workload to the brachialis by bringing the arm across the body.
- **Calm curl for constant tension** [04:19] — The 'calm curl' is a cable-based exercise with a pronated grip that maintains constant tension on the brachialis, especially in the mid-range.
- **Overhand pull-ups** [03:36] — Overhand pull-ups with a narrow grip minimize biceps contribution and emphasize the brachialis, making them a good compound exercise.
- **Dedicated brachialis workout** [07:15] — For faster growth, dedicate an entire workout to the brachialis once a week, in addition to regular arm or pull training.

### Conclusion

To achieve wider arms, you must prioritize the brachialis muscle. Incorporate brachialis-specific exercises like cross-body hammer curls and calm curls into your routine, and consider dedicating a weekly workout to this muscle for faster growth.

## Transcript

If you're having a hard time filling your shirt sleeves and the situation only gets worse when people look at you from the front, well, you've got a width problem. And all the bicep curl variations in the world are not going to solve it. I'm going to help you to solve that width problem.
It's the only way that I know how. As a matter of fact, it worked for me and there was one very unfortunate incident that actually led me to being forced to do all these things I'm going to show you here today once again. And guess what? They led to the same results that I expected and I expect to deliver to you today too.
because I'm waving around this muscle marker. We have to start by looking a little bit at the anatomy. When we look at the arm inside of the shirt sleeve, we look and focus, of course, on the bicep. But the width of the overall arm is being impacted by not the bicep,
but by this muscle right here. And that's the brachialis. And of course, the muscle marker helps me to locate that for you very easily. But you can locate it for yourself by just simply grabbing your fingers over the top of your bicep to where it starts to drop in.
and right after your fingers that muscle that top shot right there is the brachialis and that's the one that you have to train specifically if you want to grow your biceps to be thicker or wider and guess what when you grow them this way this muscle will also hypertrophy and push the biceps
up as well to help you to fill up that shirt so no matter what angle people are looking at now i mentioned an unfortunate incident there's an injury to my biceps where i actually tore my biceps trying to hold my son up on the ice well it forced me to change my training around and
this is where you're going to benefit. Because if we look at these biceps again, you can see the difference. This is the end of this bicep, and this is my elbow. This is the end of this bicep, and this is the elbow. You can see how much of a difference there is in terms of the gap that's
there as a result of that torn bicep. Well, along with this gap, the torn long head of the bicep created a lack of width, something that I needed to be able to train around. Not to mention the fact that when I have the injured bicep, there's a lot of pain with my training. I had to figure out ways
to train around that injured bicep so I wasn stressing the area that was so hurt so I could continue to progress through my training When you think about how you trying to train your arms right now to get them wider, if you're not dedicating your focus on that brachialis muscle, then you're not
going to grow them. Now, you probably said, great, I got it, hammer curls. I've been doing these for a long time. No. See, the hammer curl is not necessarily fixing your problem because it's Kind of like getting halfway to the solution.
Again, if you look at this anatomically, you'll see that when I put my arm in this position here, when I go from a pronated position to a neutral position, look at the action of the bicep. There's clearly activity in the bicep.
Just to go from a pronated wrist here, a forearm, to a neutral forearm, right? We get that bicep activation. Well, in this position here, it would form a hammer curl. We're going to get a decent involvement of the biceps.
If I'm trying to turn them off or get them to be less involved, you can't completely turn them off whenever you're flexing your elbow, but if I want to get them less involved, then I want to perform this variation instead. This is a cross body hammer curl.
And the main difference is I'm performing it with that fully pronated forearm. When I get in this position here and I drag my arm up close to my body, you get a much more intense workload being delivered to the brachialis,
which is again exactly that muscle that you're trying to build. So I worked these into all of my bicep workouts. Whenever I would either train my arms, a pull workout, or my biceps directly, this would be the exercise that I chose.
Now, I didn't just stop here because I wanted to be able to make sure I can go back doing pull-ups again. And cheer-ups were out of the equation. For the moment, when the biceps was torn, there was way too much load on them to be able to withstand any type of chinning activity.
So instead, I went overhand into the pull-up. But again, I wanted to minimize the contribution of the biceps. So how do I do that? I take a really narrow grip. And if you have to use a band like this on the pull up bar to assist you then by all means do it I still want you doing the exercise You should be able to do at least 10 to 12 repetitions whether that be with a band or your own body weight if you want to start to build this muscle up So to do this the hands in narrow you can see force that flexion at the
elbow, but again with a pronated grip, so I can kind of decrease some of the contributions of the bicep, but focus on getting that really heavy overload of the elbow flexion, which again will hit the brachialis really, really well. Now this next one was a bit accidental. Again, remember I
was talking about I was rehabbing a bicep, but out of all unfortunate situations, sometimes we really get lucky. In this case, I really did because this is something I went on to call a calm curl, and I did this on Instagram, and people actually really found the exercise to be helpful,
but what the focus of this exercise was, where it started, was out of a variation of a cable curl. When you do a cable curl, the nice thing is there's not so much stress on the bicep in the fully extended position, and as you can imagine, with a torn bicep, I don't want a lot of stress
at the fully extended position as I'm trying to come back and get myself into more intense bicep training. But as I get to the top, I get good tension at peak contraction of the biceps. Well, I couldn't handle this in the beginning.
So instead what I did was I just shortened that down a little bit and performed this variation, which again we call the calm curl. And this is not a chest exercise. I'm not trying to do a cable crossover. What I want you to do from this position is maintain some of that pronated forearm positioning
and then just curl until your hand meets your chest. And again, do this in alternating fashion. And at the extended position here, not only do I have less stress on the biceps because it's in line with that cable, right?
So the forces through the cable decrease the tension on the biceps. But it's also because I'm in that coordinated position like we talked about. And what I found was that the thickness of the arms started to come back much faster than even when I had done workouts that didn't include this.
But then I knew that there was one other thing that I could introduce as well to transition back to regular curls or dumbbell curls. And it was this and we call this a drop curl And what cool about this exercise is again it performed out of a modified position I not in a fully supinated position at any point in the curl But what most notable here is the speed that I doing the exercise at
You want to go very slow and controlled in the first half of that curl because we know it's within that first half that the brachialis is doing more of the work. As we get past the 90 degree mark, the biceps starts to take over,
especially as we get into some shoulder flexion towards the end range of exercise. So if you want this to be really, really effective at building your brachialis, then drop the weight to the point that you can handle it at a very slow pace and make sure you stop in this mid position.
Keep the tension on the entire time because I drop it from that mid position. The one that's quote-unquote not working is actually staying in the middle portion of the rest. So they're both doing a lot of work, one isometrically and one concentrically.
All of these exercises, guys, round out literally the width of your arm to give you more of that shirt sleeve filling diameter that you need to make sure that your arms look good no matter what angle people look at you from.
And remember, you've heard it before and it's true, that as that muscle starts to build up, it lies underneath, deep to the bicep. It's going to have that impact of pushing the bicep up to give you not just the width but also the height.
If you're looking to get wider arms, guys, there's no way around this. This is one of those situations where it's the muscle that's responsible for that. And when you just skip past it by not doing direct work for the brachialis, you will never have the width in your biceps that you need to.
So if you have to, substitute one or two of those extra variations of curls that you're doing right now for a brachialis exercise or two, and I promise you, you'll be on the right path. But if you really want to start to get them to grow faster, dedicate an entire workout to your brachialis, maybe once a week in addition to your regular arm or pull training, and I promise you, you'll start to see those gains come quite quickly.
If you're looking for more science-based tips and exercises, you can find them not only here on this channel, but over at athleanx.com. If you haven't done so, click subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss a video when we put one out. All right, guys. See you soon.