Barbell Wrist Curls for Muscular Forearm
Barbell wrist curls have long been recognized as the best forearm exercises for building up muscle. Perform this exercise while sitting on a bench, leaning forward far enough to be able to place your forearms on the bench between your legs. Grip a barbell, palms upwards. Extend your wrists, lowering the barbell toward the floor. Uncurl your fingers to enable you to lower the bar a little further. Tighten your grip of the barbell and curl your wrists upward to raise the barbell just a high as you can. Lower the barbell toward the floor slowly, and repeat the exercise.
Farmer’s Walk
This is one of the best forearms exercises that are traditionally used for increasing the strength of the forearms. It is seen often in many strongman competitions. Pick up a fairly heavy dumbbell in each hand. With your arms straight down at your sides and your shoulders down and back, walk as far as you can go until your grip on the dumbbells can no longer be maintained. Place the weights on the floor to give your arms a chance to recover. After a brief rest, pick up the weights again and continue walking.
Reverse Barbell Curls
This is another one of the best forearm exercises for building up your forearms and your biceps at the same time. Grip a barbell with an overhand grip, hands spaced about hip width, and your feet spaced at shoulder width. Ensure that your thumbs are on the top of the bar, not wrapped around it as usual. With your arms straight and the barbell laying across your thighs, curl the barbell up to the level of your shoulders. Let the barbell slowly return to the start position and perform the exercise again.
Hand Grippers
This exercise can be performed anywhere at any time. All it takes is a small hand gripper, one of the best forearm exercisers ever invented, which is available at any sporting goods store. One exercise simply involves gripping the gripper, closing it as far as possible and holding it in the closed position for as long as you can. Another good exercise is to progressively increase the number of grips done with each hand. Squeeze the gripper once with one hand, and then do the same thing with the other. Each time you change hands, increase the number of times that you squeeze the gripper by one. Keep doing this until you simply cannot do any more.
Newspaper Scrunch
This is certainly an unusual name for an unusual exercise that is great for strengthening your fingers and forearms. Take a single sheet of newspaper and grab it by the corner using your thumb and forefinger. Using only these two fingers, gather the sheet of paper up into a ball, and then squeeze the ball tightly in your hand until your grip tires. Do this again with your other hand. Keep alternating hands until you have scrunched up the entire newspaper.