By Jacob Chambers, Founder & Lead Reviewer · Updated 6 August 2026
The bicep has two heads, and only one of them makes the shape people are after. The short head sits on the inside of your arm and adds width when you look at it from the front. The long head runs down the outside, crosses the shoulder joint as well as the elbow, and forms most of the peak you see when someone flexes from the side. Train nothing but standing barbell curls and you'll grow both heads reasonably well, but you'll leave the long head short of what it could be.
Here's the mechanical reason, and it's the only bit of anatomy that matters for programming. Because the long head crosses the shoulder, its length changes with your arm position. Pull your upper arm behind your torso and the long head is stretched before you've curled a single inch; push your arm out in front, as a preacher bench does, and it's already slack. Curling from a stretched position is what biases the long head, and every exercise below is some version of that idea.
Shoulder position genuinely shifts where the work lands. Research on the effect of shoulder position on biceps EMG across different dumbbell curls compared incline curls, preacher curls and standing curls, and found the incline and standing versions kept high activation through the whole elbow range, while the preacher curl peaked early and dropped off. In practical terms: preacher curls burn at the start of the rep, incline curls burn at the bottom stretch and stay hard all the way up.
Grip matters less than most gym advice suggests. A comparison of three curl variants and their effect on biceps brachii and brachioradialis found the biceps did the bulk of the work regardless, with the grip mainly changing how much the forearm muscles contributed. So spend your attention on where your elbow sits, not on whether your palms are turned a few degrees.
The best long head exercise, and the easiest to set up at home. Set an adjustable bench to somewhere between 45 and 60 degrees, sit back into it, and let your arms hang straight down so your elbows finish behind your torso. Curl without letting your shoulders drift forward. The moment your elbows travel towards your hips, you've lost the stretch that made the exercise worth doing.
Use less weight than you would standing. Two thirds is about right. The bottom third of the rep is where the long head gets hammered, so lower slowly and pause for a beat at full extension rather than bouncing out of it. Three sets of 8 to 12 is a solid dose. Full technique in the incline dumbbell curl guide.
An underused move that keeps the elbows travelling backwards through the whole rep. Hold a barbell or a pair of dumbbells against your body, then curl by dragging the weight straight up your torso while your elbows slide back behind you. The bar stays in contact with your shirt the entire way.
Range of motion is short and the weight will feel embarrassing, which puts people off. Do them anyway. Because the elbow moves backwards as the elbow bends, the long head stays under tension at the top instead of going slack the way it does in a standing curl where the forearm ends up vertical.
The version bodybuilders reach for when they want a stretch under constant tension. Set a cable at the lowest pulley, take the handle in one hand, then step forward a pace so the cable runs behind your leg and your arm hangs a little behind your hip. Curl from there, keeping your upper arm still.
Cables beat dumbbells here for one reason: tension doesn't disappear at the bottom. With a dumbbell at full extension, gravity pulls straight down through an almost straight arm and the muscle gets a break. A cable pulling backwards keeps the load on. If you own a cable machine, make this your second bicep exercise.
A cousin of the above with a slightly different setup: face away from a low pulley, arm extended behind you at roughly shoulder height, and curl forward. It exaggerates the stretched start position further still. An exploratory EMG study comparing traditional dumbbell and bayesian cable curls is one of the few pieces of research to look at this variation directly, and the interest is warranted: the resistance curve suits the position better than free weights do.
Start light and expect the first set to feel awkward. Getting the distance from the pulley right takes a few attempts.
Not a pure long head move, though it deserves a place. Curling with a neutral grip, palms facing each other, shifts a chunk of the work onto the brachialis, which sits underneath the biceps and pushes the whole muscle upwards as it grows. That contributes to arm thickness in a way direct bicep work can't.
Do them at the end of an arm session, or alternate them with incline curls week to week. See the hammer curls guide for detail.
Bodyweight, brutal, and the biceps get plenty of it. A supinated grip with hands about shoulder width puts the arms in a strong pulling position, and heavy chin ups build biceps as reliably as any curl. The long head isn't isolated, since the lats are doing most of the work, but the sheer load your arms handle makes up for it.
If you can already do 12 clean reps, hang a weight from a dip belt rather than chasing higher rep counts. More in the chin ups guide.
For anyone training without a bench or cables. Anchor a resistance band under both feet or to something low behind you, step forward until your hands sit slightly behind your hips, then curl. The band gets harder as it stretches, which lines up neatly with the part of the curl where you're strongest.
It's the cheapest way to reproduce the incline curl position, and a decent set of resistance bands costs less than a single dumbbell.
Two short sessions a week beats one long one. Something like this:
Session A: incline dumbbell curl 3 sets of 8 to 12, drag curl 2 sets of 12.
Session B: behind-the-body cable curl 3 sets of 12 to 15, hammer curl 2 sets of 10 to 12.
That's ten sets a week of direct arm work, on top of whatever rowing and chinning you already do. Progress by adding a rep before you add weight, and be honest about whether your elbows are staying put. A pair of adjustable dumbbells and an adjustable bench covers most of this list at home, which is why they're the two purchases we recommend to anyone building a home gym around arm work.
One expectation to set. The height of your bicep peak is largely decided by where the muscle attaches near your elbow, and no amount of incline curling changes that architecture. Training the long head properly builds the muscle you have. Whether it ends up looking like a golf ball is a question for your parents.
Incline dumbbell curls, drag curls, behind-the-body cable curls and bayesian cable curls all bias the long head, because each puts your upper arm behind your torso and stretches the muscle before you curl. Hammer curls and close-grip curls help too, though they share the work with the brachialis and brachioradialis rather than isolating the long head.
It sits on the outside of your upper arm and forms most of what people call the peak, so growing it does change the shape of a flexed arm. How high that peak ends up is mostly down to where your muscle bellies attach, which is genetic. Training the long head hard makes the most of what you have; it will not give you Larry Scott's arms if you were not born with the insertions.
Get your elbow behind your body. The long head crosses the shoulder joint as well as the elbow, so pulling your upper arm backwards lengthens it, and curling from that stretched position loads it hardest. Incline curls with the bench at 45 to 60 degrees are the simplest way to do this at home.
For the long head, yes. The preacher curl puts your arm out in front of you, which shortens the long head and shifts emphasis towards the short head and brachialis. EMG work has shown biceps activity peaks early in the preacher curl and stays high through the whole range on the incline curl, which fits what you feel doing them.
Six to ten hard sets a week of long head focused curls is plenty alongside your rows and chin ups, which already work the biceps. Two sessions of three sets, or one dedicated arm session, both work. Biceps recover quickly, so frequency helps more than piling everything into one brutal session.
Yes. Anchor a band low behind you, step forward until your arms hang slightly behind your torso, then curl. That reproduces the stretched position an incline bench gives you, and the band's increasing tension matches the strongest part of the curl. It is the cheapest way to train the long head if you have no bench.
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