Barbell biceps curl
Also called barbell curl, barbell bicep curl, standing barbell curl, straight bar curl.
What is a barbell biceps curl?
A barbell biceps curl is a curl taken with both hands on one bar, palms up, moving from straight arms to full elbow flexion while the upper arms stay down by the ribs. It trains the three elbow flexors, brachialis, biceps brachii and brachioradialis, rather than the biceps alone, and the muscles of the forearm work to hold the bar without moving it. The bar is what separates it from a dumbbell curl: it fixes both hands at one width and one rotation for the whole set, and it takes far more load than most people can put in each hand. A straight bar and an angled EZ-bar are both ordinary ways to do this movement, and choosing between them is a question of what your wrists tolerate rather than a technique rule.
How do you perform a barbell biceps curl?
Set up
- Hold the bar with an underhand, shoulder-width grip and wrap your thumbs around it.
- Stand tall with your feet hip-width apart, arms straight and the bar against your thighs. Brace your midsection and keep your elbows by your ribs.
Execution
- Curl the bar toward your shoulders by bending your elbows. Keep your upper arms still by your sides, and do not swing or lean back.
- Keep your wrists straight and stop at the highest point you can reach without moving your elbows forward.
- Lower the bar under control until your arms are fully straight.
Common mistakes
Swinging the bar up with the hips and lower back
The barbell is the curl you can genuinely load, so it is the curl people bounce. A hip drive throws the bar through the middle of the rep, which is where the forearm is horizontal and the elbow flexors are working hardest, so the range you added the weight for is the exact range the swing skips. It also loads your lumbar spine in extension with a weight hanging out in front of you, which is a poor trade for an arm exercise.
Letting the elbows travel forward at the top
Once the upper arms lift, the shoulder starts doing the lifting and the bar tracks in toward the shoulder joint, where it takes almost nothing to hold. It feels like a bigger rep and it is a smaller one for the elbow flexors: the top of the movement becomes a rest rather than the hardest part.
Stopping short of straight arms at the bottom
Cutting the bottom off is how a weight that is too heavy hides. Half a rep still counts in your log, so the number on the bar keeps going up while the range comes down, and the position you are removing is the one where the elbow flexors are longest.
Forcing a grip width the straight bar cannot give you
A straight bar locks both hands at one spacing and in full supination at the same time. If that combination does not match how your forearms hang, the difference has to go somewhere, and it goes into the wrists. The fix is a different width or an angled bar, not training through it.
Flexing the wrists to finish the rep
Curling the wrists at the top moves the bar a few centimetres using the forearm flexors and the wrist joint while the elbow does nothing extra. You get a harder squeeze in the forearms, a loaded wrist in a bent position, and no more work for the muscles the exercise is for.
Where it fits in a session
Usually at the end of a session, after the pressing and pulling. Putting it first is defensible on an arm-focused day: of the curls, this is the one that takes real load, so it is the one that benefits most from being done while you are fresh.
Isolation work for a small muscle group, so the useful range is moderate reps taken close to failure with the elbows still, rather than a heavy low-rep single-digit set that turns into a hip swing. The barbell invites loading it, which is its advantage and its trap. A practical stopping rule: the set ends on the last rep you could do without your torso helping, not on the last rep the bar moved.
Muscles worked
- brachialis
- biceps brachii
- brachioradialis
- wrist and finger flexors
Three elbow flexors, listed together rather than ranked, and the secondary entry earns its place by holding the bar rather than by moving it. The exercise's name is the misleading part: the anatomy references call the biceps brachii a strong supinator of the forearm and only a weak flexor of the elbow, and the brachialis the primary flexor at the elbow, a pure flexor that works at every forearm position. The list is unranked because the chapters do rank these muscles and disagree with each other — one calls the brachialis the strongest elbow flexor in the absence of supination, another calls the brachioradialis the strongest flexor of the forearm outright. A barbell curl holds the forearm supinated throughout, so on the first chapter's wording the biceps' share should be larger here than in a neutral or pronated curl. That is what the wording implies, not a measurement of this exercise. The brachioradialis flexes the elbow in any forearm position, and from the full supination a straight bar imposes it pulls back toward pronation rather than further into supination.
What lifters actually do
About half of regular RepCount users have logged a barbell curl, and it appears in roughly one workout in nineteen, which is less often than either the dumbbell curl or the hammer curl. Its most frequent company is a hammer curl, in more than a quarter of the workouts that contain it; after that come pulldowns, cable rows, pull ups and barbell rows rather than pressing. Typical use is about three sets inside a session of roughly seven exercises. Lifters treat it as loaded arm work at the end of a pull day.
Most often trained alongside
Share of barbell biceps curl sessions that also include each exercise.
- Hammer curl27.7%
- Pulldowns27.5%
- Cable row20.5%
- Pull up16.6%
- Barbell row16.5%
Figures come from workouts tracked in RepCount.
Variations
- EZ-bar curl — Angled bar sets the hands part way between palms-up and neutral, which most wrists tolerate better than a straight bar.
- Preacher curl — Upper arms rest on a pad, so the elbows cannot travel and the stretched bottom position is the hardest part of the rep.
- Spider curl — Chest against an incline bench with the arms hanging straight down, which puts the hardest part at the top instead.
- Drag curl — Bar dragged up the front of the torso with the elbows going backwards. A different movement rather than a stricter version of this one.
- Reverse barbell curl — Overhand grip. Often treated as its own exercise; the brachioradialis works in that forearm position as it does in every other.
- Close-grip barbell curl — Hands inside shoulder width. Changes where the wrists and elbows sit more than anything this page can vouch for.
- Wide-grip barbell curl — Hands outside shoulder width, with the same caveat in the other direction.
- Straight-bar cable curl — Cable pulls at an angle rather than straight down, so the top of the rep holds more tension than a free bar does.
Frequently asked questions
What muscles does the barbell curl work?
The three elbow flexors: brachialis, biceps brachii and brachioradialis, plus the muscles of the forearm holding the bar. The name is misleading. Anatomy references describe the biceps brachii as a strong supinator of the forearm but a weak elbow flexor, and the brachialis as the primary flexor at the elbow, a pure flexor that works at every forearm position. The brachioradialis flexes the elbow whether the forearm is palms-up, neutral or palms-down, so it is involved in every curl you do.
Should I use a straight bar or an EZ-bar?
Whichever your wrists prefer. This is a preference, not a technique point, and nothing on this page recommends one over the other. A straight bar holds the forearms fully palms-up; an angled bar puts them part way toward neutral, which many people find more comfortable for the wrist and elbow. If an illustration on this page shows one of them, that is what the picture could show, not what you should use.
How wide should my grip be on a barbell curl?
Wide enough that your wrists sit comfortably, which for most people is somewhere around shoulder width, and it is worth moving your hands a couple of centimetres either way to find it. You will read that a narrow grip builds one head of the biceps and a wide grip the other. This page is not making that claim: it is not something we have verified, and grip width has a much more obvious effect on where your wrists end up.
Is the barbell curl better than the dumbbell curl?
They are different constraints rather than better and worse. A bar fixes both hands at one width and one rotation, which makes it stable and easy to load. Dumbbells let each arm find its own path and let the wrist rotate, which suits people whose wrists dislike being held palms-up under load, and they train each arm on its own.
Do barbell curls work your forearms?
Partly, and not in the way people usually mean. The brachioradialis, on the thumb side of the forearm, is an elbow flexor and is working through the whole rep. The muscles that flex your wrist and fingers are holding the bar without moving it. That is grip work, not wrist training, so a curl is not a substitute for training the forearm directly.
How often do lifters actually do barbell curls?
About half of regular RepCount users have logged one, and a barbell curl turns up in roughly one workout in nineteen, which puts it behind both the dumbbell curl and the hammer curl for how often it appears. More than a quarter of the workouts that contain it also contain a hammer curl, and after that the exercises around it are pulldowns, cable rows, pull ups and barbell rows. It is arm work on a pull day.
Sources
- Anatomy, Shoulder and Upper Limb, Biceps Muscle. StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519538/
- Plantz MA, Bordoni B. Anatomy, Shoulder and Upper Limb, Brachialis Muscle. StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK551630/
- Anatomy, Shoulder and Upper Limb, Forearm Brachioradialis Muscle. StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK526110/
- Anatomy, Shoulder and Upper Limb, Forearm Compartments. StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK539784/