Why curls are bad

So if you are deciding between sitting on the couch and doing bicep curls, get up and curl some stuff! It is a weight-lifting movement that has minimal impact on your joints when done correctly. If curls bother your elbows at all, you should try a neutral grip with your palms facing each other. AKA a Hammer Curl. If that still bothers you, you probably need to head to a physical therapist.

No matter how you curl it, bicep curls are still good for one thing in particular—making bigger biceps! There is a reason you still see muscular men doing bicep curls.

If your goal is hypertrophy or bigger biceps, then your focus should be time under tension. Don't worry about the heaviest weight you can lift. Instead, find a weight that you can control and see if you can keep tension on your biceps throughout the movement. Don't ever swing your arms or use momentum to move the weights up and down unless you are "cheating it up" to do a heavy negative. If your goal is to increase the size of your biceps, I would start your workout with a set of chin-ups , seated rows , or bent-over rows.

Followed by a few sets of high-volume curls. Think four sets of 12 curls. Focus on lowering slowly until just before your arms are straight and then coming back up without allowing your biceps any break between repetitions. But if you are just looking to have an athletic, strong body then bicep curls are way down near the bottom of the list of exercises you should be doing.

I could easily name 10 exercises you should be doing long before bothering with bicep curls. In fact, here they are:. Looks like I went with 11 exercises instead. If you are doing all 11 of those you will be well on your way to having a great body. The biceps work with the triceps, shoulders, traps, and lats to allow the shoulder and elbow to function optimally.

Without these other muscles, overtrained biceps can lead to painful, performance-inhibiting imbalances, poor posture , shoulder pain, and the inability to fully extend the elbows. Shank says functional, multijoint movements such as deadlifts, inverted and bent-over rows , carries, pull-ups, and chin-ups are preferable ways to build biceps strength while maintaining good posture and biomechanics.

If you really want to do curls, play with different styles. He also advises pairing your pulls with pushes — combining curls with pushups, or pull-ups with overhead presses — and stretching your biceps and shoulder muscles after a training session. Your email address will not be published.

Just make sure you aren't hyperextending or locking out your elbows at the bottom. While you should focus on contracting your biceps during your curls, don't neglect your wrists, either, says Becourtney. Often, people lose wrist control during the exercise, allowing the weight to control or collapse the wrist, especially during the lowering portion.

Fix it: Keep your wrist in a slightly flexed position that you're able to maintain throughout the movement, says Becourtney. Don't let your wrist flip into extension as you lower the weight, as this can increase risk of injury.

Often paired with using momentum during the exercise, you may notice your elbows flare out or move behind your back as you lift the weight, says Mathew Forzaglia , certified personal trainer and founder of Forzag Fitness on the NEOU App. Fix it: Using a mirror, focus on keeping the elbows pinned to the sides of your body, keeping a straight back, too. If you struggle to keep your elbows at your sides, you may need to lower the weight you're using.

Elbow flexion bending the elbow can only occur with the help of several muscles , including your biceps brachii, brachioradials and brachialis, Becourtney says.

But performing only one version of a curl can sometimes lead to neglect of certain accessory muscles in this movement. Fix it: Vary your grip on the weights in order to hit all of these muscles. In addition to the palms-up, standard grip, try neutral grip hammer curls and palms down reverse curls. Also, opt for a variety of weights, too, including dumbbells, barbells and cable machines.

While it's important to train a variety of curls and grips, as Becourtney mentioned, one curl variation does stand out against the others. If gaining biceps strength and size is your goal, do concentration curls. When compared to cable curls, barbell curls, chin-ups and EZ-bar curls, concentration curls — which are performed in a seated position with the curling elbow propped up on the inner portion of the knee — have shown significantly higher biceps activation than the others, according to August research from the American Council on Exercise ACE.

Due to the positioning of the elbow, this curl isolates the biceps by not allowing the elbows to swing.