Standing Concentration Curl
How to do the standing concentration curl
- Taking a dumbbell in your working hand, lean forward. Allow your working arm to hang perpendicular to the ground with the elbow pointing out. This will be your starting position.
- Flex the elbow to curl the weight, keeping the upper arm stationary. At the top of the repetition, flex the biceps and pause.
- Lower the dumbbell back to the starting position.
- Repeat the movement for the prescribed amount of repetitions.
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.
How this movement works
One joint changes angle and the resistance travels toward you along a single arc. Nothing is positioned to help, so tension stays where you aimed it and the usable load drops sharply against a multi-joint pull for the same muscle. Protect the range of motion; buying weight by shortening the arc defeats the point.
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:
- Standing One Arm Bicep Curl with Cablecable
- Wide Grip Standing Biceps Curl with Barbellbarbell
- Bicep Curl Lunge with Bowling Motionmedicine ball
- Bicep Curl with Machinemachine
- Brachialis-SMRfoam roll
Difficulty
Listed at beginner level: the pattern is simple enough to pick up without coaching, and a position that goes wrong mid-set is obvious enough to correct on the next repetition.
Of the 99 biceps exercises in this database, 38 are listed at beginner level.
Photos: free-exercise-db — public domain (Unlicense) Full attribution →
ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.