There’s no question, but building muscular forearms will improve your appearance, but that’s only part of the benefit. Muscular forearms will also improve your performance when participating in sports or while exercising. Pull-ups, deadlifts, and bicep curls are much easier to perform when you have good muscular forearms. The following article looks at some of the best forearm exercises to build those muscular forearms.

Barbell Wrist Curls

Barbell wrist curls have long been recognized as the best forearm exercises for building muscle. Perform this exercise sitting on a bench, leaning forward enough that you can place your forearms on the bench between your legs. Grab a bar with your palms facing up. Extend your wrists, lowering the bar toward the ground. Uncurl your fingers to allow you to lower the bar a bit more. Squeeze your grip on the bar and curl your wrists up to raise the bar as high as you can. Slowly lower the bar to the ground and repeat the exercise.

farmer’s walk

This is one of the best forearm exercises traditionally used to increase forearm strength. It is often seen in many strongman competitions. Pick up a fairly heavy dumbbell in each hand. With your arms down by your sides and your shoulders down and back, walk as far as you can until you can no longer hold onto the dumbbells. Place the weights on the floor so your arms have a chance to recover. After a short rest, pick up the weights again and continue walking.

Barbell Reverse Curl

This is another one of the best forearm exercises to build your forearms and biceps at the same time. Grasp a barbell with an overhand grip, hands hip-width apart and feet shoulder-width apart. Make sure your thumbs are on top of the bar, not wrapped around it like usual. With your arms straight and the bar resting on your thighs, curl the bar to shoulder level. Let the bar slowly return to the starting position and perform the exercise again.

hand pliers

This exercise can be performed anywhere and at any time. All it takes is a little hand gripper, one of the best forearm exercisers ever invented, which is available at any sporting goods store. One exercise is simply to hold the clamp, close it as far as it will go, and hold it in the closed position for as long as you can. Another good exercise is to gradually increase the number of grips made with each hand. Squeeze the clamp once with one hand, then do the same with the other. Each time you change hands, increase the number of times you squeeze the gripper by one. Keep doing this until you just can’t 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 with your thumb and forefinger. Using just these two fingers, gather the sheet of paper into a ball, and then squeeze the ball tightly in your hand until your grip tires. Do this again with the other hand. Keep alternating hands until you’ve crumpled up the entire newspaper.