How To Do Hammer Curls With The Proper Form.
By Arthur Brown
You’re probably wondering how to get wider biceps and fill your shirt sleeves. Maybe you’ve been to the gym, but you’ve only extended the peak of your biceps. Unfortunately, most pieces of training miss out on this.
From now onwards, target your exercises to hit the brachialis muscle. Focus on training it in the right way and regularly. Eventually, your biceps will be thicker and impressive.
The brachialis muscle is found underneath the long head of the bicep muscle. It is located between the biceps and the triceps. It is responsible for bicep width.
Read on to learn how you can train this muscle effectively and achieve a solid bicep width.
What Is A Hammer Curl?
It is also called a neutral dumbbell hammer curl. Here you use a neutral grip with your palms facing each other during a full motion range, unlike in a regular curl where you rotate your wrist up to the sky.
While with the regular curl, you are working a lot of the interior of the bicep. This exercise focuses more on the width of your bicep and your forearm.
Hammer curl is not a bicep-specific movement because there is no supination. Supination is what engages the biceps. That’s why you feel them so much when you do a regular dumbbell curl.
You target the brachialis muscle with the hammer curl. It will grow that muscle and push up on the biceps, making your arm look much more significant when you flex.
There’s little engagement on the bicep with hammer curl since you’re still curling the weight. But a majority of the engagement is going through the brachioradialis and the little brachialis muscle. A bigger brachialis helps increase the peak of your biceps.
What Is The Proper Form For A Hammer curl?
How do you perform the exercise correctly? You begin with the primary ways to do any curl. Place your hands at the side and have an excellent base. Keep your knees loose and not locked out. Ensure your elbows are soft and not locked out. For perfectly done hammer curls, take a neutral grip of the dumbbell, then hold it to your side. Have a straight back and look straight forward, not hunched forward. And fully extend your arms.
Then in a very controlled motion, repeat this process for 8-12 rounds:
- Curl the weight up. This you can do in two ways—either straight up your body or across your chest.
- Squeeze at the top. Flex everything you’ve got here. You will feel it in the middle of your bicep and on your forearm if you’re doing it right.
- Come back down.
Understanding how to do the curls properly protects you against common mistakes. While in the gym, at times, you may be tempted to sacrifice your form so that you can handle more weight. If that’s your case, you should ensure that you aren’t guilty of the pitfalls.
Breathing is essential during this exercise. As you come up, you’re going to breathe out. Then you squeeze, release, and breathe in.
You can use either both arms together or one at a time. Remember, you’re not dropping the weight down on each repetition. Focusing on that squeeze at the top ensures you achieve excellently and smooth up and down movements.
Gripping The Dumbbell Properly
How you grip the dumbbell will play a massive role in how much weight you can lift and how many repetitions you will do. This is because forearm fatigue kicks in quickly with this exercise. If your forearms give out, that means your grip gives out. Then you can’t do any more repetitions.
Focus less of your effort on gripping the dumbbell. This way, you will minimize forearm fatigue so that you can perform more repetitions.
You can grip the dumbbell with your hand in the middle. Or you can grip it more towards the top so that some of the weight of the dumbbell rests on the top of your hand.
In the first option, you have to squeeze so hard to hold that dumbbell in place. After that, your grip strength can start to give out relatively faster. Thus, limiting the reps, you can take.
For the other option, you don’t have to grip it hard to perform your repetitions. Here you won’t have to rely so much on your grip strength to hold the dumbbell.
Mistakes to Avoid
An incorrectly done hammer curl may cause you injury. And you won’t achieve your goal of widening your biceps.
Watch out for these common mistakes:
- Moving your elbow forward; it should stay locked in position
- Shrugging your shoulders during each rep; you should keep your shoulder traps depressed
- Wrist curls at every rep; you should keep the wrist in neutral or in a slightly extended position to both increase your stability and place more attention on your biceps
- Failing to establish a mind-muscle connection
- Throwing the weights up
- Curling too fast may engage the biceps more and miss the brachialis muscle
- Too much momentum will affect your balance and reduce your capacity to build strength during the exercise
- Too much weight; you should start with lighter weights and only add in proportion to strength you build and master your form
- Not doing a full range of motion; you should combine both the eccentric and concentric movement phases.
Benefits of Hammer Curl
A proper hammer curl will benefit you in the following ways:
- Improve your upper body stability
- It will enhance your arm strength since it works on multiple muscles at once
- You gain grip strength which will allow you to pull heavier loads
- It will improve your mobility since it is a functional exercise
- Boosts your muscle endurance
- It will improve your wrist stability because, throughout the exercise, your wrist will remain in a neutral position
- Increases your bicep size and strength
- You will gain a general muscular appearance which makes you healthier
Like any other exercise, you will also need to include proper warm-ups, rest, and a good diet for an excellent outcome. A proper dumbbell hammer curl will give you better forearms, thicker biceps, more muscular arms, and an improved upper-body definition. You’re now armed with how you should do a proper neutral hammer curl.
