Your biceps and triceps may get most of the attention during your upper body strength workouts, but if you want real strength and symmetry, you’ll want to train your forearms as well.
Forearms are important for more than just filling the bottom half of shirt sleeves. Your forearms are key to grip strength, which is essential for everything from everyday activities like opening a pesky jar to gripping a barbell for a maximal deadlift attempt. Grip strength has also been linked to longevity—so if you want to live longer, it’s worth giving your forearms some love.
But there’s more to forearm training than squeezing a stress ball for hours on end. You must have a series of movements integrated into your workouts to target the muscle group – let the celebrity train Don Saladin Y mh fitness director Ebenezer Samuel, CSCS will walk you through five of the best forearm exercises to do.
The 5 essential forearm exercises
Plate clamping with pinch grip
Take a light set of weight plates, grab it by squeezing the plate with your thumbs on one side, fingers on the other side, and hold. If you want to level up the difficulty, Saladino suggests walking while keeping the weights steady.
Key to this exercise (and all grip and forearm training maneuvers): grip with intent. “If Don stops creating that tension and that grip on his forearms, all of a sudden those plates will just fall off,” says Samuel. If you don’t want the weight to come crashing down, you need to maintain the effort for as long as you can.
towel lifting
This is a difficult exercise that pays off for more than just forearm strength; Saladino says that he takes the pull-up to another level, engaging the shoulders, lats and core as well.
If you’re having trouble with pull-up reps, Samuel says even hanging from the towel can be a good starting point. Just keep your grip as tight as possible.
Fat Grip Deadlift
You will need extra equipment for this exercise. You can invest in a set of Fat Gripz, training tools that expand the circumference of barbells and dumbbells to make them harder to hold, or a couple of hand towels wrapped around the barbell. Keep in mind that your goal here is totally different than if you were training for a max weight pull.
As Saladino points out, it’s much more common to use some sort of aid like straps to reinforce your grip, often the weakest point in a heavy lift. Instead, the goal is to make that job more difficult. Consequently, you’ll want to drop the weight here and focus on grabbing with intention and squeezing the bar as hard as possible. That will only make your standard lifts stronger. “When I go back to a heavy weight, hopefully I’ll be able to hold that weight a little more comfortably,” he says.
Bottom-up kettlebell grip
You’ll need a kettlebell for this exercise, which is actually a way of holding weight to challenge your forearms. According to Samuel, there are two ways to implement retention into your workouts: simply get into position and hold isometrically for a while, or walk.
The key to the bottom-up position is to keep your forearm perpendicular to the ground. Once the arm angle drops, the weight will lean forward. You will challenge more than just your grip, especially once you start walking. Shoulder and core stability will also take care of keeping the weight in place.
farmer transport
Saladin calls the farmer’s carry the most underused exercise in fitness and the king of forearm exercises. “This is a moving board,” he says. If he doesn’t have room to walk, he can simply walk in place holding his weight at his sides. You can use everything from kettlebells and dumbbells to trapeze bars, and you can really work with heavy loads.
Along with your forearms, the basic farmer’s carry is also great for your shoulders and core, and once you start moving under a heavy load, it’ll even get your heart rate up. “It’s a phenomenal drill, and it’s also very safe.”
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