Placing Greater Torque at Shorter or Longer Muscle Lengths? Effects of Cable vs. Barbell Preacher Curl Training on Muscular Strength and Hypertrophy in Young Adults

Performing different types of biceps curls, such as hammer curls or preacher curls, leads to different amounts of muscle growth and strength improvements depending on how the movement is performed.

When people who exercise recreationally train with their muscles stretched more during movements, they gain a bit more muscle size compared to training with varied muscle lengths, but both approaches lead to the same improvement in strength.

When you do exercises that stretch your muscles more through a bigger movement—like doing full squats instead of tiny half-squats—you may build more muscle tissue than when you stay in a shorter, more restricted movement range.

When you do preacher curls for 10 weeks, your strength in the middle and fully bent positions gets better no matter if you use a cable or barbell — the resistance pattern doesn’t make a difference there.

Men and women both gain the same amount of biceps size and strength from preacher curls — whether they use a cable or barbell — so the training works equally well for both sexes.

When resistance is applied such that peak torque occurs at either the longest or shortest muscle length during a movement with identical total range of motion, muscle hypertrophy is not significantly different between conditions.