What's the best bicep exercise you're not doing?
I'm not talking about EZ-bar curls, barbell curls, preacher curls or concentration curls either.
I'm talking about the humble incline dumbbell curl.
How to do it
Set an incline bench to a low angle, around 15°. Sit with your backside tucked into the corner and your upper back and lats pinned to the pad.
Let the dumbbells hang straight down, slightly behind your body. From here, the only thing that moves is your elbows. Curl the weights up, then lower them under control until your arms are fully straight again.
Your hips don't move. Your shoulders don't move. Nothing else moves. It sounds easy. It isn't. Even light dumbbells will humble you fast.
Here are three reasons to add them to your program.
1. They're strict
Because you're seated on an incline, there's nowhere to hide. Your torso, shoulders, lower back and hips are all locked in place.
No swinging your hips. No shrugging the weight up with your shoulders. No cheating it out of the bottom.
The only way the dumbbell goes up is with your biceps. That means true isolation and no ego lifting.
2. Bigger range of motion, deeper stretch
With a barbell, the bar rests against your thighs at the bottom. With incline curls, your arms hang behind your body, putting your biceps under a much deeper stretch.
Training through a longer range of motion, at longer muscle lengths, is a great recipe for hypertrophy.
It also forces you to use less weight, which means more control and more reps taken close to failure.
Light weight, savage pump.
3. Less stress on the rest of your body
Standing curls almost always recruit a bit of body English to grind out the last few reps. Seated on an incline, there's no momentum to borrow.
That's good news if you have cranky shoulders, since they're taken out of the movement almost entirely.
It's also great if you suffer from lifter's elbow or elbow tendinitis, as many of us do from time to time. Grab a light pair of dumbbells, something like 5 to 7.5Kg, and do high reps. In my experience, they're excellent for rehab. Your mileage may vary.
And unlike preacher curls, there's no pad to give you a false sense of stability. Incline curls keep you honest about what you can really handle.
How to program them
Add incline curls as an accessory at the end of an upper-body session: after bench press, overhead press, or whatever your main lift is that day.
Aim for 3 – 4 sets to failure with a weight you can curl for at least 12 – 15 reps. Do them a couple of times a week.
Stick with it, and those puny pythons will be anacondas before you know it.
Already a fan of incline curls? Let me know how they've worked for you, and share this with anyone still swinging a barbell for their curls.