The muscle myth almost everyone believes.
Quick question. What do your biceps actually do?
Most people say "they bend the arm." That's true but it's not the main job. The biceps' primary function is actually twisting the forearm, rotating your palm to face upward. The bending is secondary.
Here's how you can feel this for yourself in about ten seconds:
Bend your arm all the way up, but keep your palm facing down, like you're about to knock on a door.
Touch your other hand to your biceps. It's not fully flexed right? — even though your arm is bent as far as it goes.
Now turn your palm to face up, while keeping the arm bent. Feel that? That's the biceps switching properly on. The bend alone only does part of the job. Full contraction needs the twist too.
Why does this matter to you?
Because if you don't know what a muscle actually does, you can't ask it to do that job properly and you end up training around the muscle instead of through it.
This shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. Take your lats for example. The big muscles across your back and most people assume a wide grip on a lat pulldown or pull-up gives a better "stretch," so wider is better, right? ... Not quite. Your arms are also working hard in that movement, and your arms are far weaker than your back.
So if your hands are turned into their weakest position (palms facing away from you), your arms fail before your back gets properly worked. Turn your palms to face each other instead, and your arms get stronger, which means your back finally gets pushed as hard as it's capable of instead of being let off the hook by tired arms.
Your chest muscles are another good one. They look like they do two completely different jobs: 1) pulling your arm backward in a pull-up, and 2) pushing your arm forward in a dip. But muscles can only pull, never push. What's actually happening is that your chest is built to pull your upper arm into one specific position which is close to your body, slightly in front. From any starting point, it pulls toward that same spot. It's not doing two opposite jobs. It's doing one job, from two different directions.
Okay so what is your point?
Most exercise selection is built on assumption, not function. People train the way they've always seen it done, or the way it looks like it should work but not the way the muscle is actually built to move.
This is exactly why, in your sessions with us, you'll sometimes notice we're particular about hand position, range of motion, or the exact angle of a machine. It's the difference between a muscle doing its full job, or only doing part of it while something else quietly takes over the work.
What this means for you, practically:
Trust the setup, even when it feels slightly unfamiliar. If a grip or position feels different to what you've done before, there's usually a reason — we've thought about what the muscle is actually meant to do, not just what looks like a normal exercise.
And if you're ever curious why we've set something up a particular way, just ask us. We love this stuff, and we'd rather you understand the "why" than just go through the motions.
The better the muscle is actually working, the less time you need in the studio to get the result. That's the whole philosophy.