Patriot Health Digest
You may not consider it often, but grip is among the most important parts of your strength training. Want to use heavy deadlifts, work with big weights for farmers carries, or even just work on a strong set of pullups? You must be able to hang on your the bar. Grip strength is very important. In fact, studies have found that people with stronger grips are usually healthier and less likely to die.
Training your grip means also training your forearms, which are too often ignored in the aesthetics department as men normally focus on the more obvious arm muscles such as biceps or triceps. Forearms are attractive too, and no one wants to see your sleeves rolled up if you don’t have muscles to show off. You should give some extra time to your forearms for both size and strength, and you do not need a whole gym’s full of equipment to to do neither.
Bodybuilder Eugene Teo has one old school solution he loves to increase his forearm size and strength. “Build stronger, bigger forearms and grip and improve your elbow pain for some athletes by training with this underrated action—extension,” he writes in his short video’s caption. You only need a rope or a band to attach to your weight (preferably a plate, with a hole that makes it easy to tie-on) and something cylindrical to wrap your rope around, like the end of a barbell. You can even use a broomstick as your handle, but you will be better off with a wider area to grab. If you are using the sleeve of a barbell, you can put it on a bench to hold it while you work on the exercise.
Once you are set up, the execution is easy. Grasp your bar tightly with your hands on both sides of your rope, then roll your weight up and down, twisting the bar with every turn. “Rolling your weight up and controlling it as it goes down strengthens your extensor muscles on the top of your forearms, which are normally undertrained muscles for better grip strength,” says Teo.
He counts every twist as one rep, rather than each full weight raise from bottom to top. Take on 3 to 5 sets of 8 to 15 reps to burn your forearms to get the size and strength you are after.
Author: Scott Dowdy
