reckonerIncline dumbbell curl
A curl lying back on an incline bench, arms hanging straight down behind your body. That position starts the biceps stretched, and in a twelve week trial it grew the biceps a little more than a preacher curl did1. It is a curl to do slowly and with less weight than you think.
Arms hang straight down, curl up.
- Pattern
- Arm isolation
- Trains
- Biceps
- Kit
- Dumbbell, incline bench
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 10 to 15 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 1 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Very low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Elbow
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the bench back and sit into it
Set an adjustable bench to a moderate incline and sit with your back and head on the pad, a dumbbell in each hand. The incline is what lets your arms hang behind your body, which is the point of the lift.
Let the arms hang straight down
Arms fully straight, hanging toward the floor and a little behind your torso, palms facing forward. This is the start of every rep, and it starts the biceps stretched.
Curl without moving the upper arms
Bend at the elbows and bring the bells toward your shoulders. The upper arms stay still and pointing at the floor, so the elbow does the work rather than the shoulder.
Lower all the way
Take the bells back down slowly until your arms are straight again. A rep that stops short of straight skips the stretched part this curl is for.
What goes wrong
Bringing the elbows forward
Lifting the elbows toward the front makes the curl easier, so it creeps in as you tire. The shoulders join in and the stretch is gone. Keep the upper arms hanging and the movement at the elbow.
Sitting up off the pad
Sitting up feels like a stronger position to curl from. It brings the arms in front of you and throws away the stretched start. Keep your back and head on the pad.
Using your standing curl weight
It is the same pair of bells, so it feels like it should be the same weight. From a stretched start you will curl less than you do standing. Take lighter bells and finish every rep.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 10 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 10 kg | More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 3 x 11 at 10 kg | More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 3 x 12 at 10 kg | More reps 12 → 13 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 13 at 10 kg | More reps 13 → 14 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 14 at 10 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 10 kg | More reps 14 → 15 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and 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
Incline curl or preacher curl?
Both work. In one trial the incline curl grew the biceps a little more and the preacher curl grew the brachialis and the forearm flexor more, with the total the same1. In another, the incline curl grew more near the shoulder and the preacher curl more near the elbow2.
What angle should the bench be?
A moderate incline that lets your arms hang behind your body while your back stays on the pad. Lower the back rest and the stretch gets bigger, so drop the weight if you lower it.
Will Reckoner put this in my plan?
It can. It sits in the curl group, and the weight is one dumbbell, the number written on the bell in each hand, stepped on the dumbbell rack's own steps. Elbow is recorded against it.
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
- Kobayashi, Maeo and colleagues, Journal of Sports Sciences, 2026. Exercise-specific preferential hypertrophy of individual elbow flexor muscles after incline versus preacher dumbbell curl training twenty-one untrained adults training one arm with incline and one with preacher dumbbell curls for twelve weeks, the biceps growing 22.1 per cent after incline against 18.9 after preacher, the brachialis and brachioradialis more after preacher, and total elbow flexor growth not different
- Kassiano and colleagues, International Journal of Sports Medicine, 2025. Distinct muscle growth and strength adaptations after preacher and incline biceps curls sixty-three young women over eight weeks, with greater growth at the proximal elbow flexor site after incline curls and at the distal site after preacher curls