Doing bicep curls on an incline bench might build your biceps muscle better than doing preacher curls, especially in the middle part of your upper arm.

Doing bicep curls on an incline bench builds more muscle in the upper part of your biceps than preacher curls do.

Different bicep curl exercises lead to different patterns of muscle growth: incline curls cause more growth near the shoulder end of the biceps, while preacher curls cause more growth in the brachialis and brachioradialis muscles along the forearm side of the upper arm.

For guys new to lifting, doing bicep curls with your arms in front of your body works just as well for building arm muscle as doing them with your arms behind you — both give about the same 6% to 9% growth in 10 weeks.

After ten weeks of preacher curls using either a cable machine or a barbell, young adults who had never trained before gained the same amount of biceps muscle thickness, regardless of whether the exercise placed more resistance at shorter or longer muscle lengths.

When performing incline dumbbell curls, the upper part of the biceps and related elbow flexor muscles tends to grow thicker than when performing preacher curls. Conversely, preacher curls tend to produce greater thickening in the lower part of these muscles.