Drag Curl Vs. Spider Curl | WHICH BUILDS A BIGGER BICEP PEAK? – ScottHermanFitness

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It’s time to continue our VERSUS series by comparing two underappreciated and underused biceps exercises that are similar in many ways, especially when it comes to targeting that bicep PEAK! However, while both the barbell Drag Curl and barbell Spider Curl are very effective in building muscle, if you could only perform one to build your biceps, which one would you pick, and why?

Which is better, the barbell Drag Curl or the barbell Spider Curl? Well, this is a very reasonable question to ask, considering that these exercises are very similar in terms of bicep recruitment. But doing them both in the same workout is probably not optimal for muscle gain. Remember that the biceps are a small muscle group and all it takes is 1 or 2 exercises to fully exhaust them, especially if you’re training them after your back workout.

But before we dive into the actual comparison of these two movements, let’s first understand how the biceps works. Your biceps is a two headed muscle that lies between your shoulder and forearm. These two heads are often referred to as the long head and the short head, simply because the long head is actually longer than the short. The long head is located on the outside of your arm and it’s responsible for the PEAK of your biceps when viewed from behind or the side. The short head on the other hand, is on the inside of your arm and it’s what gives your biceps THICKNESS and SIZE.

To specifically target these heads is actually quite easy to do. In general, performing bicep exercises with a narrow grip, or inside shoulder width, will mainly target the long head (or outside head), whereas performing exercises with a wide grip, or outside shoulder width, will mainly target the short head (or inside head). However there is a third piece to this equation where you can actually place more emphasis on the peak of the biceps by performing exercises that focus on the contraction part of the curl, or the flex or squeeze at the top of a movement. When it comes to contracting the biceps to target the PEAK, that’s where the barbell Spider Curl and the barbell Drag Curl come in to play.

Spider Curl: Proper Form
The Spider Curl is a pretty straightforward exercise, all you need is an incline bench and a barbell. You can also use a preacher curl station if it’s available to you. There are preacher curl stations where one side is straight and one side is angled, in which case you would actually lean on the angled side so that your elbows are resting on the straight side. By doing it on an incline bench, you’re not going to have any elbow support which is going to make the exercise a bit more intense, because you’re going to have to flex and contract harder to stabilize your arms to keep them in the suspended position. Therefore, I recommend that if you’re going to do this exercise, even if the preacher curl is available, just do it on an incline bench.

You can do this exercise with dumbbells or a barbell, and I suggest using the barbell because you’ll be able to load up more weight, and the aim of this exercise is to overload the biceps and hit the peaks as hard as possible, so you want to use as much weight as possible. One last tip is that if your wrists start to hurt, you can use an E-Z curl bar if you have one, but again I’d rather you use a straight bar so can have your palms fully supinated to perform the movement.

You’re going to lie on the incline bench with your chest against the incline, and your arms hanging in front of you. You’re going to have your weight loaded up, and then grab the bar with your hands about shoulder width apart. You’ll get a nice tight grip, and then hang in the suspended position. You have to make sure when your arms are fully extended that you’re not creating any sort of angle, keep your arms hanging straight down.

From here, you’ll keep your elbows in one spot and bring the weight out and up in front of you, and curl it all the way to the top. Once you have it in the top position, this is where it gets really hard.

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