One of the most neglected part of the body is the lower arm.
If you trained it well you have developed a powerful grip, strong tendons and
your lifts can become much easier to handle. Developing the forearm can be done
in many ways but not always what you think. In the magazines you see the wrist
curls and reverse wrist curls and that’s just about it. Bodybuilders pump up
the muscle to make it look bigger but in the end that’s all it is a pump. In
the world of old school physical culture however you can develop the lower arm
in ways that make bodybuilders look like little chumps.
There are a
lot of ways to get a strong and developed forearm and some of them have nothing
to with isolating the muscle. Want to develop a powerful grip, work your hands
in different ways like Fingertip Push-ups, Bending Steel, picking up Odd Objects and moving Partial Lifting. For Bodyweight type training, work your
fingers in different exercises like pull-ups, chin-ups, Isometrics pulls and
pressing into walls all of these work the lower arm like crazy. Some people
like using grippers (and I’m not talking about those dumb little colored ones
that has 5 pounds of pressure) which you can close for a number of reps but one
of the things I've experimented with is just closing and holding it locked. If
you can close the trainer/#1/#2 relatively easily it can get boring just repping
it out all the time, instead, close it and see how long you can last,
developing that crushing strength in a different way.
An
important look at how the forearm is developed is not always through Muscle Building .
Just doing that alone is just a closed minded way to build your body and you
can only build so much muscle till you get injured. However, if you work the
tendons and ligaments of the hands, wrists and elbows, you’re building strength
in a way that makes you more powerful and far stronger in the long run. Arm
Wrestling Training really works well for forearm development because you’re
building on tendon power as well as muscle. When you train in this manner, work
on high repetitions somewhere up to 50 reps per arm per set. The stronger your
tendons are, the stronger you will be.
One last
thing to look at for building a super strong lower arm is to use a thick bar,
this puts more stress on the lower arm because you have to grip hard enough to
hold on to it. Thick bars make you work far harder than a regular bar. Say you’re
doing a bench press with a weight that you can do 10 good reps with a regular
bar, put in a thick bar with the same weight; your reps will be cut down to
about half the amount. Since thick bars are very expensive, there’s another way
to make a bar thicker, grab yourself some Fat Gripz. These babies you can take
to any gym and put on any normal bar or dumbbell, you can even put them on your
in-home pull-up bar whatever you’d like to do to make it a little more
challenging.
With Fat Gripz and the way you train hard, you can build up more natural growth hormone
and develop muscle and strength at a more rapid rate because the more of the
muscle fibers break down, the more muscle gets developed and because you’re
working the body at a different pace and difficulty, your strength grows later
on as well. I love building strength in my grip and its fun doing something
that’s out of the norm and you develop muscle an strength in a way most will
never get. Take your time and remember, even Popeye wasn't born with those big forearms;
he had to develop them someway. These are just ideas to give you a sense of how
to create your own style of forearm development and help you achieve a level of
strength that’s just insane.