Yes, this looks strange, but try it just once and you'll see how challenging and effective it is.

Reverse Bottoms-Up Biceps Curl

1. This curl variation keeps you from fully straightening the arms at the bottom or curling excessively high at the top. This creates enormous tension on the biceps because you're locked into the sweet spot of the movement where there's maximal activation and no relaxation.
2. It also promotes optimal shoulder positioning and postural alignment, which is something most lifters struggle with when training biceps. Because the load is unstable and vulnerable to falling, you have to keep the shoulders retracted and depressed throughout. Besides improving spinal mechanics, this eliminates the possibility of the shoulders becoming overly involved in the movement.
3. Another noteworthy feature of this exercise is the way it optimizes wrist mechanics. Many people lack the ability to keep the wrists locked during curls, which can produce strain on the surrounding connective tissue, tendons, and ligaments. This variation requires you to lock the wrists in order to create a solid platform for the weight to rest on. When these mechanics are transferred to heavy free-weight curls, they'll produce stronger and more efficient curling mechanics, leading to greater overload and size gains.
4. This is also one of the most unstable biceps curl variations you'll ever perform. Any cheating or swinging will cause you to dump the weight.

How to Use It

Use this either as a technique enhancer at the beginning of your arm workouts (2 sets of 5-8 reps) to help groove proper curling mechanics, or as a finisher (1-2 sets of 10-12 reps) to annihilate the arms with continuous levels of growth-inducing tension.