reckonerEZ bar preacher curl
Arms over a sloped pad, bar in your hands, and nowhere to hide. The pad takes the swing away completely, which means the load you finish the set with is the load your biceps moved.
Stop short of locking the elbow out.
- Pattern
- Arm isolation
- Trains
- Biceps
- Kit
- Ez bar, bench
- 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
- 10 kg
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Very low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Elbow
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the seat so your armpits reach the top of the pad
Sit down and adjust the height until the top edge of the pad sits in your armpits with your shoulders relaxed. If you are reaching, the seat is too low and your shoulders will do the reaching all set.
Take the inner bends of the bar
Palms up on the first pair of angles, wrists firm. Lay the whole of both upper arms flat on the pad before you lift anything.
Curl to just past vertical
Bring the bar up until the forearms pass vertical, and no further. Past that point the pad has done the holding and the tension has gone.
Lower slowly and stop short of locked
Take the bar down under control and stop just before the elbow locks out. Stop short of locking the elbow out, which is the cue on your wrist. Slamming into a straight arm on a preacher bench is how elbows get sore.
What goes wrong
Dropping into the bottom
The bar accelerates on the way down and the elbow catches it at full extension with the shoulder pinned. That is the one position on a preacher bench that reliably hurts people, and it is entirely a tempo problem.
Lifting the elbows off the pad
The upper arms peel up as the set gets hard, which turns it back into a standing curl with a worse angle. If the elbows leave the pad, the set has ended.
Believing the shoulder angle changes the outcome
Trained across ten weeks against a curl with the shoulder extended behind the body, with the resistance profiles matched, the preacher produced equivalent biceps and brachialis growth and equivalent strength1. Choose it because it removes the swing, not because of where your shoulder sits.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 20 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 20 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 20 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 20 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 20 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 20 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 20 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
Is a preacher curl better for the lower biceps?
That is the common claim and the evidence is not with it. Matched for resistance profile against a shoulder-extended curl, a preacher curl produced equivalent growth at every site measured1. What it reliably does is stop you swinging.
Why does my strength drop so much on this?
Because everything you normally borrow is gone. No hip drive, no lean, no elbow travel. A lower number on a preacher bench usually means the number you had elsewhere was flattering you.
Straight bar or EZ bar?
The library entry is the EZ bar version, for the wrists. A preacher bench holds the arms in a fixed position, so a straight bar's forced full supination is less comfortable here than it is standing up.
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
- Attarieh and colleagues, European Journal of Sport Science, 2025. Comparison between shoulder flexed and extended positions in elbow flexion resistance training on regional hypertrophy and maximum strength fifteen men training each arm on a different curl for ten weeks, one with the shoulder flexed about fifty degrees over a preacher pad and one with it extended about fifty degrees behind them, matched for resistance profile, producing equivalent biceps and brachialis growth and equivalent strength gains