Zottman Curl: How to Do It, Muscles Worked and Why It Works

The Zottman curl is a dumbbell curl with a rotation built in: you lift with your palms up like any curl, turn your wrists over at the top, and lower with your palms facing down. Two exercises stacked into one rep. It was doing the rounds in the 1880s courtesy of George Zottman, a Philadelphia strongman with famously oversized forearms, and it has outlived nearly every arm exercise invented since.

Why it survives: the biceps are strongest with the forearm supinated and weakest pronated, so flipping your grip mid-rep gives you a hard concentric for the upper arm and a brutal eccentric for the forearm without touching the dumbbells. If your arm training is a pile of curls that all look the same, this is the one worth swapping in.

How to do a Zottman curl

You need two dumbbells and enough room to stand. That's it.

1. Stand tall. Feet hip-width apart, dumbbells at your sides, palms facing forwards (supinated). Elbows tucked against your ribs, shoulders back and down.
2. Curl up. Keeping your elbows pinned, curl both dumbbells to shoulder height. Don't swing your torso back to help. Squeeze at the top.
3. Rotate. At the top, turn your wrists so your palms face the floor. Your thumbs travel outwards. Do it deliberately, not as a flick.
4. Lower slowly. With palms down, lower the dumbbells all the way to your sides over three seconds. This is the hard part, and rushing it removes most of the point.
5. Rotate back and repeat. At the bottom, turn your palms forward again and go straight into the next rep.

Muscles worked

The rotation splits the rep into two distinct jobs.

• Biceps brachii. Does most of the lifting on the way up. Forearm position matters here more than people expect: biceps excitation is highest with a supinated grip and lowest with a pronated one during the ascending phase of a curl (Biceps Brachii and Brachioradialis Excitation in Biceps Curl Exercise). The Zottman lifts in the strong position and lowers in the weak one, which is exactly backwards from how most people load a curl.
• Brachialis. Sits underneath the biceps and contributes through the whole range regardless of grip. Building it pushes the biceps up and makes the arm look thicker from the side.
• Brachioradialis. The forearm muscle that runs from your elbow towards your thumb. It takes over on the pronated descent, and forearm rotation measurably changes both its stiffness and its electrical activity during elbow flexion (forearm rotation and elbow angle study, BMC Sports Science 2025).
• Wrist extensors and supinator. Holding a pronated dumbbell against gravity for three seconds is a wrist extensor exercise whether you meant it to be or not. The supinator and pronator teres handle the turn at each end.

Why bother with the rotation

Standard curls train one grip and one direction of force. That's fine, and it builds biceps, but it leaves the forearm and the eccentric almost untouched. Two things change with the Zottman version.

The first is coverage. You get the supinated curl position, the pronated lowering position and the rotation between them, so the forearm gets loaded in a way that a hammer curl and a wrist curl combined would only partly match. For anyone training at home with limited kit, that efficiency counts.

The second is the eccentric load. Lowering with palms down puts you in a mechanically weak position under a weight your biceps just lifted comfortably, and eccentric work at that intensity is a well-established driver of strength and size. It also toughens up the tendons and connective tissue around the elbow, which is why coaches use Zottman curls with people who get grumpy elbows from heavy pulling.

Both of those matter within a sensible weekly plan rather than instead of one. The NHS asks for muscle-strengthening work covering all major muscle groups on at least two days a week (NHS strength exercise guidance), and arms are the easiest part of that to overdo at the expense of everything else.

Common mistakes

Rotating too early. Turning your wrists on the way up, before you reach the top, turns the exercise into a half-hearted hammer curl. Complete the curl, pause, then rotate.

Elbows drifting forward. As soon as your elbows travel out in front of your body, your front delts take over the lift. Keep them glued to your ribs from start to finish.

Going too heavy. The load is set by what you can lower under control with palms down, not by what you can heave up. Everyone gets this wrong on the first attempt.

Dropping the last few inches. Most people control the top two thirds of the descent then let the dumbbells fall the rest of the way. The bottom of the range is where the brachioradialis works hardest, so ride it all the way down.

Wrist collapsing back. Keep your wrist straight and locked during the pronated lowering. Letting it bend backwards under load is how elbow and wrist pain starts.

Variations

Seated Zottman curl. Sit on the end of a bench with your torso upright. Kills any temptation to swing, which makes it the better version if you're honest about your form.

Incline Zottman curl. Lie back on an incline bench set to 45 degrees and let your arms hang. The stretched starting position makes the biceps portion much harder and the weights come down accordingly.

Single arm Zottman curl. One dumbbell at a time, other hand braced on a bench. Useful for sorting out a side-to-side strength difference and easier to watch your own rotation.

Zottman curl to press. Curl up, rotate, press overhead from the pronated position, then reverse. A conditioning move rather than an arm builder, but it works well at the end of a session.

Where it fits

Put Zottman curls at the end of a pull day or an arm session, after your rows and chin-ups, when heavy loading is already done. Three sets of 10 to 12 is the standard prescription. Pairing them with hammer curls is redundant on the same day; alternate them week to week instead, or run Zottman curls with a triceps movement like skull crushers as a superset.

Kit-wise, you need dumbbells that adjust in small jumps, because progress on this exercise comes in 2kg steps at best. A set of adjustable dumbbells is the practical answer for a home gym, and our dumbbell set guide covers fixed options if you prefer them.

Recommended reads

• Bicep Curl
• Hammer Curls
• Forearm Exercises
• Best Adjustable Dumbbells UK
• Workout and exercise guides