You put curls at the end of every upper-body workout, after rows and presses. Then the exercise you most want to improve gets your most tired sets. If getting stronger at the curl is the priority, its place in the session may deserve a rethink before you add another exercise.
Research on exercise order points to a useful distinction: exercises performed earlier tend to gain more strength, while muscle growth hasn’t shown the same clear order effect. Starting with a large, multijoint lift is one possible plan, rather than a rule for every goal.
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The first spot can follow your strength goal
A review published in the European Journal of Sport Science in 2021 combined 11 studies of exercise order. When researchers pooled all strength tests, no single sequence had a clear advantage.
But looking at the exercises separately revealed the useful pattern. Multijoint lifts gained more strength when those lifts came first; single-joint exercises gained more when they came first. The finding supports putting the exercise you want to improve early, instead of deciding its place solely by how many joints it uses.
The American College of Sports Medicine’s 2026 position stand also identifies training an exercise near the beginning of a session as a way to favor strength improvement. That is guidance about prioritizing training, not a guarantee that rearranging a workout will fix every stalled lift.
Earlier doesn’t automatically mean bigger muscles
In the 2021 review, changing between multijoint-first and single-joint-first sequences did not produce a significant difference in muscle growth. ACSM’s broader evidence review likewise found no clear hypertrophy benefit from exercise order.
So “I want a stronger curl” and “I want bigger biceps” aren’t interchangeable reasons to change the plan. Our guide to hypertrophy versus strength explains that distinction. Moving curls forward is more directly supported as a strength-priority choice than as a shortcut to extra size.
The studies also don’t establish that every possible sequence gives identical growth. Their findings leave room for individual programming decisions without making the first exercise a special muscle-building trick.
Choose what moves forward, and what moves back
If curl strength is your current goal, one practical option is to put your curl work earlier after your usual warm-up, rather than automatically leaving it behind every row and press. If your main goal is a stronger bench press, keeping the bench press early fits the same principle.
That choice has a trade-off: the exercise you move later gets a different place in the session. You’re allocating priority, rather than finding an order that makes every exercise first. Keep that in mind when deciding which goal matters most for that workout.
The evidence is not a promise for every lifter. In a small 2010 trial of 31 men, researchers compared opposite upper-body exercise sequences with a control group over 12 weeks. Some exercises done last did not show statistically clear gains from baseline, yet the two training groups did not differ significantly in their absolute strength gains. Individual trials can be less tidy than a simple rule suggests.
Start by asking which exercise you most want to get stronger at. Its position can reflect that answer, even when the answer is a curl.