Starting Strength

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 both functions. Cable pressdowns can be done in this manner, but they have an interesting limitation: as you get stronger, you will eventually be able to use enough weight that your feet cannot stay on the floor.
    There is a better triceps exercise, one that is so effective at building lockout strength for the bench press that Larry Pacifico called it “the fourth powerlift.” It is the lying triceps extension (LTE), done on a flat bench in a supine position with heavy weights. Done correctly, it is safe, brutally hard, and very effective for general upper-body strength with an emphasis on the triceps. Done the way many foolish people do it – as a “skullcrusher” – it loses much of its effectiveness and safety.
    The preferred equipment for the LTE is the EZ Curl bar, a cambered bar intended for doing curls as an alternative to using a straight bar. The EZ Curl bar was invented back in the early 1970s by some poor bastard who probably didn’t make a dime off of the thing. It apparently ended up with one of the big magazine publishers who also happened to sell equipment and who started marketing it as his own device. Typical situation.

    Figure 7-60. The EZ Curl Bar, used for lying triceps extensions.

    The problem is that the EZ Curl bar doesn’t work nearly as well for curls and for recruiting biceps contraction as a straight bar does. As we discussed earlier, the degree of supination of the forearm and hand directly affects the amount of biceps in contraction. The EZ Curl bar does in fact take the stress of supination off of the wrists and elbows, but it does so at the expense