How to do the Seated Dumbbell Curl

Steps

1. Sit on a flat bench with a dumbbell on each hand being held at arms length. The elbows should be close to the torso.
2. Rotate the palms of the hands so that they are facing your torso. This will be your starting position.
3. While holding the upper arm stationary, curl the weights and start twisting the wrists once the dumbbells pass your thighs so that the palms of your hands face forward at the end of the movement. Make sure that you contract the biceps as you breathe out and make sure that only the forearms move. Continue the movement until your biceps are fully contracted and the dumbbells are at shoulder level. Hold the contracted position for a second as you squeeze the biceps.
4. Slowly begin to bring the dumbbells back to the starting position as your breathe in and as you rotate the wrists back to a neutral grip.
5. Repeat for the recommended amount of repetitions.

Tracking it in OneRep

Add the seated dumbbell curl to a routine and your previous weight and reps sit beside every set, so the decision to add load is made by what is already on the screen rather than by memory. Exercise history and volume trends are one tap away, and logging works offline for the gyms where signal does not reach.

Because OneRep tracks food on the same timeline, a stall on this lift can be read against what you were actually eating that month — which is the difference between a programming problem and an eating one. More on that in tracking progressive overload without a spreadsheet.

Where the instructions come from

The steps above come from free-exercise-db, a public-domain exercise dataset. They are general guidance, not coaching for your body: if a movement hurts, stop and get someone qualified to look at it.