Have you ever seen some pictures of muscle-bound studs with huge chests and rippling abs and thought to yourself; "Yes this is impressive but something isn't right, I can't put my finger on it - what's wrong?". The human eye is naturally good at spotting proportion and chances are, that particular person has neglected certain body parts which results in a lopsided physique.
The forearms are one of those muscle groups that few people pay particular attention to. Trainees always assume that since a lot of bodybuilding exercises involve gripping heavy weights, the forearms get adequately exercised and therefore, there isn't a need to target them specifically. Unfortunately, for most people who don't possess a natural capacity for large forearms, this is not true.
The reality is that most of us will have to work pretty hard to get impressive forearms. In my experience, you need to target the forearms with a mixture of low weight high reps exercise alongside heavy weights and low reps. You'll also need a lot of patience as you will need to do multiple sets, hitting them from multiple angles. We will look at some of these exercises.
1. Plate Pinch - The plate pinch is primarily a gripping forearm exercise. It works best with the smaller, thick metal plates. Olympic plates are far too big and will slip from your hands. The plate pinch is simple. You simply pinch two plates together with your fingers and then pick them up and drop them as many times as you can or for a set number of repetitions.
2. Wrist curls - There are multiple variations of the wrist curl. It's almost always best to do this exercise with barbell. You can do them with your palms facing up or facing down. You can do them using a bench or your knees as a support and you can also do them while standing with your hands behind your back. I recommend performing 3 sets of 10-15 reps. Volume is key with these.
3. Hammer curls - Very few exercises are as effective at inducing the burn in your forearms as the hammer curls. The advantage is that you can work with more weight as large muscle groups are involved in the movement. Another variation of the hammer curl is the cross-body hammer curl. Both of these exercises are effective at adding size to your forearms if performed consistently.
4. Reverse curls - These are an awesome way to target the upper part of your forearms. An excellent way to take this exercise to the next level is to combine a reverse wrist curl in this movement. As you reach the top part of the reverse curl, you do the concentric part of a wrist curl and as you reach the bottom phase, you do the eccentric part. This is a great way to make the exercise a tiny bit more beneficial.
great stuff my friend
ReplyDelete