As we mentioned on other posts, forearms and grip strength are essential for our daily life as well as the gym exercises. Carrying bags full of groceries or shaking someone's hand they all require grip strength. Moreover, forearms are one of the best looking, most visible and functional muscles we have. People can tell whether you lift or not based on our forearms. But when it comes to doing exercises, grip strength is essential for all the pulling exercises, and some exercises such as pullups aren't required lifting straps at all. Therefore, forearms and grip strength are essential to be correctly developed for our daily use and for the gym lifting exercises.
If your objective is to improve your grip strength in order to be able to resist more weight, more reps or simply to have bigger and better looking forearms. Here are the main exercises you can do for your forearms:
1. Dead Hangs
Dead hangs are a great exercise which will make help us develop our grip strength. They can also be helpful in order to decompress our back muscles at the end of a demanding lower back workout such as after squatting or deadlifting. Moreover, it is recommended to do various sets of dead hangs, progressively increasing the hanging time. We recommend that you first try to see how much time you can hang from the bar, and based on that time do from 3-4 sets of that time. In future, you will gain better grip strength and you will be able to hang for more and more time from the bar, just go progressively increasing!
2. Normal & Reverse Wrist Curls
Wrist curls are an excellent exercise to improve the size of our forearms. Normal wrist curls targets the top of the forearms (flexors) and reverse wrist curls target the bottom of the forearms (extensors). Lower weight is recommended to start since you can injure your wrists if high weight is lifted the first times. We recommend you perform the exercise supported with a bench and do between 10-15 reps of each side. These exercises will certainly give your forearms better density and size, achieving an overall better look as well as increasing your grip strength. Lastly, this exercise can be performed with dumbbells but we recommend to use cables, since cables offer a constant tension of the whole repetition in comparison to free-weights.
3. Farmer's Carries
Farmer's carries can be the equivalent to dead hangs but with the weight in your hands instead of hanging from your bodyweight. This can be done while walking or just standing. In addition, this exercise targets both sides of the forearms as well as the brachioradialis, which means that just by performing one exercise you will save time instead of targeting one side of the forearm per exercise. We recommend you perform from 3-4 sets of this exercise as well as increasing the weight over time, just keep the same time as a goal and increase the weight.
4. Reverse Bicep Curls
Reverse bicep curls certainly are a great exercise to implement to your arm or back days. You will notice that when you change your grip on this exercise, you will certainly have to drop the weight, otherwise your wrists won't be able to withstand the same weight. We recommend that you use ez bars but dumbbells can also be used for this. Moreover, a common mistake people tend to make is they keep their hand grip as normal using their thumbs, but this is wrong. You need to take off your thumb from the barbell and after doing this you will target much better your forearms.
5. Hammer Curls
Hammer curls are great to target the brachioradialis, which is difficult to develop if you not perform specific exercises. Hammer curls can be implemented to your arm and back days and also you can switch between normal bicep curls and hammer bicep curls. Gripping the dumbbells very strong will be more helpful to target the forearms.
All of the exercises mentioned above can be also functional for other purposes. For example, dead hangs are great to decompress the back and hammer curls mainly work the biceps but also the brachioradialis!
We hope you enjoyed reading this post and feel free to comment below what you think about it. You can also recommend what other things we should post about in our blog!