Plenty of dudes (some ladies too) are crazy about building big, impressive biceps so that they may look good, strong, and able fit into a sleeveless t-shirt and show off their the highly developed guns. Having a pair of huge muscular arms is all good and dandy but without an equally developed forearm, those big ol arms that you’re so proud of might be ridiculed by toddlers and gramps alike.

Train your forearms

Okay so it is obvious that a well trained forearm is critical not only to make your arms look spectacular as a whole but also for improving your grip strength.

Still, is it necessary to include forearm training as part of your workout?

If you’ve been training your whole body regularly performing presses, deadlifts, rows, and curls, won’t these movements help stimulate your forearms as well?

Think about it, almost all upper body exercises require the use of your forearms so this means that they are always exposed to indirect stimulation which may help promote growth without the need to perform specific forearm workout.

So in view of this, you might be thinking that specific forearm workout is totally unnecessary because indirect stimulation from other heavy compound exercises is more than enough to size up your forearms and give Popeye a run for his money.

Necessary it is

Well screw that thinking and start paying some serious attention to your forearms! From my personal experience, indirect stimulation is simply insufficient to build a pair of strong impressive forearms. Only those with highly blessed genetics can truly experience the benefit of indirect stimulation from performing other exercises. Mere mortals like us should incorporate a couple of forearm specific exercises to be on par with those genetically gifted monsters.

A massive pair of forearms can dramatically improve your grip strength and this my friend, will provide you the capacity to enhance your performance in other exercises.  I can’t tell you how many times I messed a typical chest routine like the flat dumbbell bench press because I had a weak set of forearms, thankfully I noticed a reasonable improvement in my overall workout when i started training them independently. Heck, I could even bang out a few reps of pull-ups (an exercise that I was never able to perform even a single rep previously) due to the increase strength of my forearms.

When to train your forearms

You should train your forearms after you work on your biceps. Normally, one would train back and biceps on the same day therefore, forearm routine should be done at the final stage of your workout. Why can’t you do it in the beginning of your workout? Because you need them at 100 % in order to perform exercises for other body-parts. If you fatigue your forearm muscles early on, you will never be able to perform some of those highly demanding back exercises like deadlifts, pull-ups, rows or even bicep curls at a 100% capacity and this in turn, will considerably affect gains in other body parts. Do a couple of forearm exercises consisting 10 to 15 reps and 1 or 2 sets per exercise.

Recommended Exercises

Dumbell Wrist Curls

Barbell Wrist Curls

Zottman Curls

The above exercises are very effective in developing a better and stronger pair of forearms. Try not to neglect training your forearms, unless you fancy a pair of arms that look similar to a couple of chicken drumsticks?

Good luck and cheers!

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