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- One of the most underrated things that completes
the physique and also makes you so much stronger in the gym
is a pair of beefy, strong forearms.
Training them can be tricky though,
that's why we're bringing you
our top five exercises for training forearm.
- A hundred percent, I mean, this is all tied in
from a joint by joint approach.
So the stronger we get our forearms,
the more resilient our elbows, the stronger our shoulders,
the more we can pull, the more we compress,
yet this is a very underutilized tool.
- There's also a lot of research out there
that says your grip is strong.
That correlates to living life longer.
- Grip is such a factor, right?
Like you might be dead-lifting, you might be doing pull ups,
you could be doing basic, just straight arm pull downs.
And when your grip starts giving out on you
that's gonna hinder you
from being able to really exhaust specific muscles,
the way that you need to.
- These five exercises will help you
strengthen your forearms both creating the definition
and the size you want,
and the strength is gonna make you stronger
at everything else.
So let's get right into it.
Our number five exercise seems super simple.
It's so much harder than it looks.
And it's all about training the small muscles
in our forearm.
- Basically a Pinch Grip Hold.
What I recommend everyone to do is grab a light set
of plates, like 10 pound plates, whatever it might be right,
right here I have 25s and I'm just gonna grip it.
And I'm just gonna hold that weight in one place.
Now, if I want, make it a little bit more difficult
I could start walking, right?
And that walking, that dynamic motion
is gonna enable my grip to have to work a little bit harder.
- Exactly, and this is also hitting at the heart of
what you're gonna see in all of these forearm exercises
which is the critical responsibility of our forearms
and of our grip.
And the best way to train that is to grip with intent.
If Don stops creating that tension and creating that squeeze
at his forearm, suddenly those plates are just gonna drop.
- So you're gonna drop, right?
- So many ways to progress it.
You could, even, if you didn't want to go heavier,
if you found bad at the 25s, that creates a different grip
challenge, there's so many ways to kind of play
with this much, and that's why I love it.
- As we're fatigued, the first thing that go on me
is my grip strength.
So I'll notice in things like my pull up or my holds
where if I'm fatigued and my readiness, isn't quite there.
I'll notice that that grip begins to diminish on me.
It's probably one of the best indicators
of my readiness for that day.
- Exactly, so get the play pinch in your workouts,
that's number five.
- Number four on our list of forearm exercises
is a Towel Pull Up.
There's no faking this movement.
I mean, first off you have to be able to do a pull up,
secondly, you gotta be able to grip your body
holding onto a towel, which in my opinion
has just taken the pull up to another level.
Forearm strength, shoulders, latch strength,
core strength, endurance,
probably one of the more difficult of the pulling exercises.
- You're right, there's no way to hide.
Even just hanging there.
I think hanging there is a really good way to start
because you're gonna even feel yourself
flipping down the towels there.
And then once we start to do the pull up
what happens from a forearm standpoint
is we've got all that little micro correction
that has to occur as we're pulling up.
And there's so much core stability there too.
- Yeah, and also shoulder resiliency, right?
As those forearms from a joint by joint approaches,
those forearms get stronger,
those elbow joints are gonna get stronger
and the functionality of the shoulder
can become more resilient.
- You put it really well,
when we were going over the plate bench
a lot of forearm exercises,
when we learn to grip with intent,
start to affect our shoulders in good ways,
when we're doing that.
- There's no faking this.
You have to be able to move well.
You have to be very strong to be able
to perform this exercise.
- Just like on the plate pinch
we can play with the thickness of the towels.
Add to that, it's gonna be a lot harder to grip.
The more narrow and skinny towel though
the easier it's gonna be to hold
but it's still a ton of work.
So there's a lot of ways that you can progress this
to really grow your forearms and the process
beef up your back too.
Number three on our list, the Fat Grip Deadlift
but really all you need for it is a pair of towel.
and we've been talking about gripping with intent
throughout because that's so key to forearms
and this lift is all about gripping with intent.
- It's almost ironic with the deadlift, right?
Because a lot of times we're going
to using straps or versa grips or something
to help us grip the bar a little bit easier.
Now we're going in the complete opposite direction.
So remember the thicker, you build the grip up,
the less you're gonna be able to deadlift.
And I've seen people with 500-600 pound deadlifts,
build up their grips and they're not pulling
more than 225 pounds.
So it is gonna be humbling.
But what I just did was I took like a very simple,
you know, hand towel and I wrapped it.
And then I'll basically fold this over
to build up somewhat of a thick grip.
Now for me, yeah, that's fine,
now, if I wanna get more ambitious
I can fold that over one more time
and we could build that grip up now, even thicker.
So that's where I'm gonna go with today,
'cause I like making things a little bit more difficult
for myself, but we're gonna build that grip up a bit
and now you could take a very light load
and you can make it very challenging.
Now this is really teaching me to crush the bar
and you'll see it, that at a lot of times when people
are taking these false grips
they're not utilizing their thumb around the bar.
I've gotta really squeeze and grip this bar
to the best of my ability
which is gonna make a very lightweight, much more difficult.
But in turn, it's gonna strengthen my forearms.
And then when I go back to a heavy weight
hopefully I'll be able to hold that weight
a little bit more comfortably.
- Forearm training is all about finding different ways
to force our grip towards,
and with this, what we get is that thickness,
and because of that thickness,
you have to squeeze that much harder,
translates to everything
- Everything, and this also becomes a fun tool for me
on days where I'm just taxed.
Yeah, I don't know about you, but sometimes
I'm turning around, I'm beat up from travel,
I'm beat up from work, coming in
and even thinking about hitting a max deadlift
or a really grueling three rep max or a five rep max
is just not in the cards for me that day.
This enables me to go a little bit lighter on my system
but work on a different quality
that I may not normally work on with my training.
- Okay, and then you take this,
if we remove those towels that would become so much easier
because the grip is so much stronger,
which is the heart of every single one of these
forearm moves.
So that's number three, add the fact grip
to your deadlift and really to any other lift
you can add it to a bicep curl just about anything.
You'll still get that impact.
Second on our list is another exercise
where you just can't really hide.
Now we're gonna take a kettlebell
and you have to do this with a kettlebell
and we're gonna go to something called
a bottoms up position.
We're gonna use this in two ways.
You can either do this just holding or you can do it
in a standard farmer's carry, but either way
what Don's done here and the trick with this
and the way it's working his forearms,
the way his grip is really challenged,
is this kettlebell, because of the upside down position,
he has to make sure to keep his forearm
completely perpendicular to the ground.
That's gonna be a lot of braky radialis work.
It's gonna be a lot of general forearm work
and he's got a grip nice and tight
because just like all our other forearm exercises,
he cannot hide.
If he loosens that grip
he's just not gonna be able to hold it.
- Even from a balance and stability standpoint
I could take this moving stationary
and then it becomes a moving plank.
If I start walking with this kettlebell,
which is in a bottom up position,
my core begins to work a little bit more.
I start feeling my glutes,
my legs are firing a little bit
because I'm working those anti rotators.
So my body wants to drop to one side
so it has to engage and pull back using the other side.
That's why I love these asymmetrical movements.
But if you just get into this position here,
and if you grab a light kettlebell to start
and say take 25 steps, you know, with each leg,
with each arm and, you know, in each direction
you're just gonna feel this exercise.
It's gonna go such a long way with shoulder stability
functionality with the shoulder, forearm resiliency,
you're gonna feel great from it.
- Exactly, I think what you're seeing
as we progress through these forearm exercises
is we're handling them very differently
than we handle some of the other exercises.
We're not trying to do a lot of isolation movements
to target specific muscles.
Instead, it's all about time under tension,
this is really an isometric hold for Don
where he's gotta maintain this position
and he's gotta kind of hold it and-
- Crushing the grip.
- Exactly, and he can't, there's no moment
during this bottoms up where he can relax.
Just like there was no moment to relax on the towel pull up,
no moment to relax when we were on the fat grip dead lift,
these are the heart of reform motions.
This is number two.
Wait till you see what comes next.
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- And the one forearm exercise,
Ebe and I feel that no one should be skipping
is the Farmer Carry.
Now this is probably, in my opinion,
the most underutilized exercise in fitness,
let alone being one of the best forearm exercises.
- Yeah. - Elbow resiliency,
shoulder strength, core, total body.
This is a moving plank.
So if Ebe picks this weight up right now,
now Ebe can turn around and use kettlebells
or even dumbbells.
And the kettlebells have a little bit of a fatter grip on it
which I like.
And it's just basically a walk.
So he's gonna take one step after the other.
Or if you don't have space Ebe,
we can just go on a basic marching, right?
And you could do this for time,
you could do this for distance, but in my opinion
this is probably the king of forearm exercises.
This is that one drill that you just have so much bang
for your buck on heart rate, fat burning.
You know, as well as I do when you're carrying heavy weight
across the gym floor for distance or for time,
your heart rate goes to the roof,
like you're doing intervals.
- It's called the Farmers Carry
when we look at farmers, right?
All those guys because they're lifting heavy all the time
and they're walking around with these heavy lows.
They wind up with the same Jack forearms
that you're trying to chase at home.
So it's a really, really natural way to train so much stuff.
And you, like you said, it's so much more than forearms.
Forearms are a byproduct
but there's so much resiliency you get with the move too.
- I've seen even physical therapists post, you know,
rehab as they're, you know, bringing someone back
into training on the floor.
This is a phenomenal drill,
as long as it's directed by your PT,
to be able to start with, that's gonna help,
you know, reestablish that loss of strength
in your upper body.
It's a phenomenal drill, but it's also very safe,
which, you know I love.
- The reason it's tops on our list of forearms moves,
I think whenever you look at any list we create
for hypertrophy and the ultimate
always winds up being something where we can load it up.
- Yeah. - And you can load up
this Farmer's Carry whatever the heaviest dumbbells are,
I mean, strong men wind up grabbing giant yolks
and carrying those around-
- Trap bars, you can use, you can use a trap bar carry
like we'll stand in trap bars and we'll pick that up,
600-700 pounds and walk through the floor.
It's a very easy movement to load heavy, but be safe.
- Exactly, be safe, but grip the heck out of it,
you're not gonna have a choice,
can't hide from these forearm exercises.
That was number one,
hit this whole list your forearms will be jacked.
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