The barbell curl is a great way to work on your fitness and strength, and it’s a necessary addition to your workout routine if you are looking to complete your training guide. That being said, barbell curls would help you get your arms in shape as well-toned and developed.
How to Do the Barbell Curl
Stand Upright
To do the barbell curl, you need to stand up tall, with your chest up ad shoulders to the back. Make sure that your grip is a bit wider than your hip-width and face your palms away from your body.
One common mistake most lifters make is to pull their shoulders forward instead of backward, making them bend forward. So, be sure that your chest is high, and your shoulders are to the back so that you can expose your entire biceps to the weight.
Grip the Bar
Most barbell curlers do not do this, and as a result, they end up having their elbows flared out while doing the barbell curls. You should squeeze the bar so that your chest doesn’t collapse, and your biceps don’t lack fullness and width. Gripping the bar would allow your hands to stay supinated and prevent your elbows from flaring out.
Also, you can squeeze your pinkies on the bar, as though you want to snap.
Curl Up Just A Little Bit
Instead of just pulling the bar up to your body in a swift move, why not just keep your elbows a bit positioned in front of your body all the time.
Keep curling up, and make sure your shoulders don’t come up forwards. To make it more intense, you can lean back a bit to increase the range of motion in which the barbell would go. Remember to keep your shoulders back, bend your elbows forward a little, and put your chest up.
Squeeze At The Top
Lift the barbell to your chest level, and not higher than that. If you lift it higher than that, you will notice that your biceps would get more relaxed, and the shoulders would contract. You are expected to maintain the tension on your biceps.
Remember that if you curl up way too high to your chin, then you will involve the anterior shoulder, and this isn’t the plan. Flex your biceps when you lift the weight to the top and don’t relax.
Control The Eccentric
You should bring down the load in the same patterned way you lifted it. When you get to the bottom of the curl, still maintain the same tension.
So many lifters tend to relax and reduce tension at the end of the curl, but that would only ruin your chances of building serious pipes.
Benefits of Doing the Barbell Curl
Increased Upper Body Mass
When you add presses and rows to your barbell curl exercise, you have set up an effective method to improve your body’s overall strength and muscle mass. This exercise is incredibly helpful if you want to improve the upper strength of your body, increase lean muscle mass, and improving the strength and functionality of muscle groups like biceps.
Bigger Biceps
That’s pretty obvious? Yes. The barbell curl can be tagged as the most result-orientated exercise in arms training, as it helps to develop the biceps and forearms significantly. Bigger biceps doesn’t just help in improving your performance, but there are a handful of lifters that get their strength and motivation from having excess beef popping from their shoulder sockets, and well, you can’t fault them for that.
Increased Grip Strength
The barbell curl focuses on increasing your grip and arm strength. This strength would come in handy when you have to engage in carries, gymnastics, and weightlifting. Although the forearms are part of the secondary muscle groups, an increase in wrist stability would have a great impact on other movements too.
Reduces Risk of Injury
Your biceps are in charge of the elbow flexion and play a role in helping the grip muscles as well. So, when your biceps are weak, it would make it difficult for you to engage your grip muscles properly, and cause strains and tears to the biceps. This would eventually lead to a reduction in high loading based exercises. You can train your biceps by doing pull-ups and other exercises, but there is a time when you should engage, particularly in arms training.
Muscles Worked When Doing Barbell Curl
When done correctly, the barbell curl effectively targets the – biceps and forearms.
Who Should Do the Barbell Curl?
The barbell curl is an excellent exercise if you are looking to improve your arm and grip strength, and also if you are working on increasing your strength and fitness level.
Furthermore, a barbell curl can be done as a form of performance training for athletes/lifters that are at risk of developing elbow or bicep injuries.
Strength athletes also use the barbell curl to improve their eccentric loading potentials whenever they are engaging in intensive pulling training. Also, they use the barbell curl to increase the size and functionality of their biceps, and this is vital during pulling motions like rope pulls, rows, etc.
Increased arm strength plays a vital role in your upper body strength, and it can also help you if you struggle during handy movements like deadlifts, because it helps to increase arm strength and prevents fatigue.
Barbell Curls Programming Recommendations
When doing the barbell curl exercise, you should have two milestones in mind, you either want to increase your arm strength or improve your bicep hypertrophy. Regardless of whichever one you choose, we have a put out the recommended sets and reps you should follow.
For Hypertrophy
If you are training to improve your biceps hypertrophy, then you are expected to follow the below recommendations:
6-10 sets of 10-15 repetitions.
Never forget that the major thing is to concentrate on the way your muscles contract, and not how you are moving the weights. You should try this with a lightweight because you don’t exactly need to go heavy to get the maximum benefit out of this exercise. All you have to do is make sure you are in the right form, and you are doing the exercise as you should.
For Strength
If you are looking to use the barbell curls to improve your arm strength, then try doing it this way:
3-6 sets of 5-8 repetitions.
Although there isn’t any specific manual out there on how you can strengthen your biceps, incorporating chin-ups and bicep exercises would help a great deal in increasing your strength.
Barbell Curl Variations
These barbell variations can be done if you wish to improve your size and general muscle growth.
Seated Barbell Curls
This variation of barbell curls is seen as a semi-range of motion barbell curls because it doesn’t include the bottom part of the motion. However, it is highly effective in improving the pressure on the biceps, while separating the upper parts of the biceps as well.
Eccentric Barbell Curls
This variation of barbell curl puts excess pressure on the biceps, which would ultimately cause eccentric damage to the tissues. Eccentric training plays a role in muscle contraction and is a surefire way to increasing your muscle growth. To efficiently do the eccentric barbell curls, you need to curl the weight up, and in a controlled and slow pace, lower the load. If you find it too challenging to curl the weight, you can get someone to assist you.
Tempo Barbell Curls
This variation is quite similar to the eccentric barbell curl, and the tempo can be a slow and calculated concentric phase too. For instance, you can keep the 4-5 eccentric dropping of the barbell, and curl the barbell upwards at a tempo of 4 seconds. This would significantly increase the total time under tension and would lead to an increase in muscle growth.
Alternatives to Barbell Curl
Preacher Curl
This is a bicep curl variation that you can perform while using a dumbbell, machine, barbell, etc. to do this exercise efficiently; you need to place your arm at a certain angle and have your arm and shoulder resting on a pad to control your movement. This would also help to separate the biceps effectively.
Hammer Curl
You can do this curl variation when you want to shake things up a bit. Although it also focuses on the forearms and biceps, it does so in a different angle, and this would add intensity to your arm development. You can choose to do the hammer curl with a dumbbell, as it would help your wrist turn and curl in a neutral position.
Chin-Up
This is still among the best exercises to add to your exercise routine if the aim is to build your biceps strength. If you don’t have the size and strength required to do chin-ups, then that may be the reason why you don’t have big arms. So, it would be best if you started by doing chin-ups to build up your biceps strength.
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