I was engaging in a rather immature discussion about forearm training in another post, and I realized I was doing nothing to actually help the cause for bigger and stronger forearms. What follows is my legitimate contribution to forearm training.
I had been doing different variations of wrist curls for about a year and wasn’t seeing a lot of results. I was getting a great pump during the workout, but not really seeing any drastic results. One day, I saw the guys on Dieselcrew.com ripping phone books and decided I wanted a piece of that! I also read on the gribboard.com that levering exercises helped with ripping strength. At that point I embarked on a journey that will probably only end with my death. One year into this journey has resulted in some remarkable size gains in my forearms, so I am sharing this with you guys now. I am hooked on gripping and ripping stuff. I have some Ironmind grippers and I destroy every phonebook that I can get my hands on. I’m sure that the crushing grip exercises that I do with the grippers has contributed to my growth, but I also feel I owe a big part of it to a simple device I made.
I call it the “wrist bar.” It is made from galvanized pipe I purchased at my local hardware store. The materials cost me about $15 and it took about 5 minutes to assemble. The pipe is 1.5" in diameter, so you have to engage your grip tp work with it. There are similar products you can buy that do the same thing as my wrist bar, but they cost about three times as much. As you can see in the pics, there is a place to load weight plates. All you have to do is unscrew the flange fitting and throw the plates on, then secure the flange back on to keep the weights from sliding off. (It uses olympic plates). It only takes about 5lbs for me to get a good workout. You can mimic sledge-hammer levering with it, but the cool thing is that the weight is variable. I’ve been using it for about a year, and I love it. My wrists have actually grown almost 1/4 inch in circumference. The ligaments and tendons actually look thicker, and my wrists look “meatier.” This thing has made my wrists pretty strong, and it only took a month or so for me to see the impact it had on my phone book ripping abilities. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any measurements of my forearms but they have grown a lot. I know almost everything I do with my hands in the gym contributes to forearm growth, but I really think levering has helped immensely.
My set/rep scheme is pretty simple. It varies sometimes, but usually involves 3 or 4 sets of anywhere from 6 to 10 reps. Once in a while, I’ll throw in some barbell wrist curls for the hell of it, but its just for fun. For me, levering is the way to go!
The attached pics show the main angles to hit with it. (Lever to head, Lever forward, Lever from inside to out).
Hope you all found this helpful.
