reckonerBarbell curl
A straight bar, palms up, elbows at your sides. It is the heaviest curl most people can do and the easiest one to cheat, because there is a whole body behind the bar waiting to help.
Elbows pinned, no swinging the bar.
- Pattern
- Arm isolation
- Trains
- Biceps
- Kit
- Barbell
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 10 to 15 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2.5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Bar
- 20 kg
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Elbow, wrist
Muscles worked
How to do it
Stand tall and set the grip
Feet hip width, bar at about shoulder width with your palms facing up. Squeeze the bar. A loose grip lets the wrists roll back under load, which is how the forearms end up sore and the biceps do not.
Pin the elbows to your ribs
Elbows tucked in and slightly in front of your hips, and that is where they live for the whole set. Elbows pinned, which is the cue on your wrist. If they travel forward, the shoulders have started helping.
Curl to the top and stop
Bring the bar up until your forearms are just past vertical, and stop before your elbows want to lift. The palms-up grip is the one that gets the most out of the biceps, measurably more than a neutral or a palms-down grip1.
Lower until the arms are straight
Take three seconds on the way down and finish with the elbows fully open. Full range beats a shortened one on every pooled outcome2, and the bottom is the end people abandon first.
What goes wrong
Swinging the bar up with the hips
A small dip and drive gets the bar past the hardest part and the rep count keeps rising while the work stops. If you have to lean back to finish, the set finished a rep ago.
Letting the elbows drift forward
As the bar comes up the elbows travel with it, the forearms end up vertical early, and the last half of the rep is the shoulders lifting a weight that is already floating. Elbows stay where you put them.
Stopping short at the bottom
Half a rep at the bottom keeps a burn going and leaves the lengthened part of the range untrained, which is the part pooled comparisons of full and partial training favor keeping2. Straight arms every rep.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 30 kg, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3 x 10 at 30 kg | More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 3 x 11 at 30 kg | More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 3 x 12 at 30 kg | More reps 12 → 13 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 13 at 30 kg | More reps 13 → 14 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 14 at 30 kg | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 14 at 30 kg | More reps 14 → 15 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. The lighter week is over, so this is back to three sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
Should I curl palms up or use a bar that angles my wrists?
Palms up gets the most out of the biceps: measured against neutral and palms-down grips at the same load, the fully supinated grip produced the highest biceps brachii excitation of the three1. If a straight bar hurts your wrists, an EZ bar is in the library and Reckoner treats it as the same lane.
Why does Reckoner drop this when I declare an elbow or wrist problem?
Because a straight bar fixes your forearms in full supination and gives the wrist nowhere to go. Elbow and wrist are the two restrictions recorded against it, and the angled-bar and dumbbell versions stay in your plan.
Do I need direct arm work if I already row and do chin-ups?
You get a lot from them. In a measurement of three bar pulls the biceps ran between 78 and 96 per cent of a maximal isometric contraction3. Whether you need more on top of that is a volume question, and more weekly sets keep buying more with shrinking returns4.
Similar movements
Reckoner eases the load first when this lift stalls, and offers one of these only if it stalls again after that. A lift already as light as your kit goes has no load left to ease, so the offer comes straight away. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Coratella and colleagues, Sports, 2023. Biceps brachii and brachioradialis excitation in biceps curl exercise: different handgrips, different synergy ten competitive male bodybuilders curling a cable at an eight repetition maximum with supinated, neutral and pronated grips, with biceps brachii excitation in the lifting phase greater with the supinated grip than the neutral by twelve per cent and than the pronated by nineteen, and brachioradialis excitation also greater with the supinated grip than either of the others, and no significant grip differences in the lowering phase
- Wolf and colleagues, International Journal of Strength and Conditioning, 2023. Partial vs full range of motion resistance training: a systematic review and meta-analysis a meta-analysis reporting a trivial standardized mean difference of 0.12 in favor of full range training, with every outcome favoring full range but all effects between trivial and small, and a subgroup suggesting partials held at long muscle lengths may match or beat full range for size
- Youdas and colleagues, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2010. Surface electromyographic activation patterns and elbow joint motion during a pull-up, chin-up, or Perfect-Pullup rotational exercise twenty-five participants measured across three bar pulls, with biceps brachii running from 78 to 96 per cent of a maximal isometric contraction and significantly higher during the chin-up than the pull-up
- Pelland and colleagues, Sports Medicine, 2025. The resistance training dose response: meta-regressions exploring the effects of weekly volume and frequency on muscle hypertrophy and strength gains sixty-seven studies and 2058 participants, with size and strength both rising as weekly set volume rises and both showing diminishing returns, and weekly frequency compatible with a negligible effect on size once volume is accounted for