Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [183]
Start the upward phase of the curl by sliding your elbows forward as you move the bar in the same arc that it moved in on the way down. Elbows stay against the ribs the whole way up; this keeps the hands in supination by maintaining the supine position of the forearm. A good cue for this position is to think about pushing the medial pad of the palm – the part just above the wrist and on the little-finger side of the hand – into the bar, as if this were the only part of the hand in contact with the bar.
Figure 7-58. The medial chunk of the palm – the “hypothenar eminence” (see Figure 3-10) – is the key to ensuring maximum supination during a curl. Push the bar up while thinking about using this part of the hand.
You will need to keep your wrists in a neutral position, neither flexed nor extended but in a position that keeps the metacarpal bones of the hand in line with the forearm. Drive the bar back up to the starting position, keeping your hands supine and your elbows on your ribs. During this upward phase, your elbows will move forward to return to their position in front of the bar, producing shoulder flexion in addition to elbow flexion. It is common to see the elbows leave the rib cage and assume a position in line with, or even outside, the hands on the bar. This error involves the deltoids in the movement and reduces the biceps’ involvement. Keep your elbows close to your ribs and make them slide forward on the way up.
During the curl, it will be very difficult to maintain a perfectly upright posture if you use any weight at all. The lifter/barbell system must balance over the middle of the foot, which means that as the bar moves forward through its arc, the body must balance the mass of the bar by leaning back. The heavier the weight, the more the lean. It is neither necessary, desirable, nor possible to try to stay strictly upright during a heavy barbell curl. If you are training for strength, you must use heavier weights, and you will find that the physics of placing a heavy bar in front and your body in back cannot be circumvented. Do not flex or extend your knees at all, or let an excessive amount of upward movement out of the bottom be initiated by the hips instead of the elbows. “Excessive” is a judgment call – once again we see why some exercises are “ancillary.” Cheat curls are a legitimate exercise, depending on what you want out of the movement. If a heavy weight is started with a little hip extension and finished with a substantial amount of unassisted elbow and shoulder flexion, the cheat curl is probably legit. But if you start it with your hips and knees and then dive under the bar to receive it in full elbow flexion, you are doing a reverse-grip clean, defeating the purpose of the exercise, risking several injuries, and inviting the criticism of more experienced, disciplined lifters.
Figure 7-59. The barbell curl. Note the starting position at the top with the elbows in flexion.
Triceps exercises
Most of the triceps work that gets done in gyms all over the world is performed on some type of cable device. In most cases, the common “triceps pressdown” is the exercise of choice, being the one most frequently seen in magazines and exercise books, and being the easiest to do while looking in the mirror. But the simple pressdown only works the distal triceps function – elbow extension – and ignores the fact that the triceps crosses both the shoulder and the elbow and therefore has a proximal function as well. Shoulder extension is the proximal function, and the most efficient triceps exercises incorporate