Cross Body Hammer Curl with Dumbbell

🎯 Biceps🏋️ DumbbellIsolationForearms (2°)

How to do the cross body hammer curl with dumbbell

  1. While standing, grab a dumbbell in each arm with palms facing in.
  2. Keeping your palms facing in (and not twisting your arms) curl the dumbbell up towards your opposite shoulder.
  3. Bring the top of dumbbell up to and touching the shoulder.
  4. Slowly with a controlled manner, lower the dumbbell back to the starting position.

Muscles worked

The prime mover is the biceps brachii, which bends the elbow and rotates the forearm palm-up.

Even with a single joint doing the moving, the muscle is not working alone — the forearms hold the grip, which is often what gives out first.

Every exercise for:BicepsForearms

How this movement works

Everything happens at one joint. That gives you direct control over where the tension sits; the trade-off is that the muscle gets no help, so the load that feels hard here is a fraction of what a multi-joint version of the pattern would take. Slow, complete repetitions beat heavy ones.

It is filed under strength: produce force against resistance for a countable number of repetitions, and progress the resistance over time.

What you need

Dumbbells let each side work on its own, surfacing a strength difference between limbs that a barbell would quietly cover for, and leaving the wrist free to rotate through the movement.

Every exercise using:Dumbbell

These train the biceps too, using equipment this one does not:

Related exercises

Illustration: Everkinetic — CC BY-SA 4.0 — license. Modified versions are shared under the same license. Full attribution →

ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.