#76 - Unlocking Massive Forearm

Ever wondered why, despite your best efforts, your forearms just won't grow? Join me, Gus Holland, on Whey of Life as I unravel the secrets to unlocking true forearm potential. In this episode, I dive deep into the nuances of forearm development, from effective nutrition strategies to the ideal balance of rest and recovery. I guarantee you'll walk away with actionable advice that will turn your forearm game around, whether you're looking to improve muscular endurance or seeking sizeable growth. 

Tune in as I lay out the details of structuring your forearm training for maximum results, without the risk of overtraining. I share my personal routine, including how and when I incorporate forearm exercises and why form should never be compromised. If you've ever been curious about why calves and forearms require a different training approach than other muscle groups, this episode has the answers. Get ready to adjust your workouts, fine-tune your diet, and achieve the forearm strength and size you've been chasing.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Way of Life. I'm your host, Gus Holland. Today, we're gonna be covering how to grow your forums. A lot of guys specifically have been requesting or arm exercises and tips and tricks on how to grow them, how often to train them, etcetera. So we're gonna cover that. So obviously, first and foremost, I'm gonna be covering the very basics nutrition, restaurant recovery, and consistency. These are all essential things for any form of training, whether it's cardio specific you know, specifically respiration training, or muscular endurance, muscular growth, you name it. Having a balanced diet meaning balanced for your specific goals is essential. Basically, you're going to be you're, you know, obviously you're gonna have a higher protein diet than an average person that is just training for standard health and longevity. If you're trying to build muscle, you're going to need more protein. You know, you're also probably gonna need some more rest and recovery. But in general, consuming a balanced diet with enough protein to support your muscle growth and ensuring that you're getting enough overall calories to fuel your workouts and your recovery is essential. So besides nutrition, obviously, I touched on rest and recovery.adequate rest is going to be crucial for your muscular growth. As especially I mean, even even for your day to day brain activity, like, outside of the gym. You're just you're going to need more rest, and you're going to need to ensure that you get enough sleep each night to allow your muscles to grow, but also to recover between the workouts. So your your with the with the amount of sleep you're getting, you're not just worried about your muscles growing, but you're also worried about anything else suffering as a consequence of not getting enough sleep. So lastly, there's consistency. Obviously, you're going to want to incorporate some forearm training into your routine and you're going to want to keep it consistent at least for a good while until you see some gains. Normally, what I say, this goes for calves as well. Forearms and calves are kinda similar as far as their level of fatigue, they can withstand the amount of training that they need, the amount of volume, etcetera. So you're oh, I take that back. Volume is gonna be much more on calves because you're constantly working walking on them and technically working them throughout the day. Just in day to day life, you're you are with forums, but much less so than than tabs. But anyways, either one, tabs and forums, you're gonna wanna train two to three times per week with enough volume specifically for you to stimulate growth. And then on top of that, you're gonna you're really, really gonna want to have enough rest in between each each session. So you're I wouldn't necessarily say train forearms three days in a row. You know, you can do like Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or however you wanna split it up and incorporate it into your routine. Normally, I like to think things that are I guess things that I'm working on specifically, like, if I'm saying, oh my calves are are really lacking or my abs or my forearms. Those kind of, for me, at least, all fall into a similar category of wanting to hit them more often with enough volume to stimulate the growth while also maintaining enough adequate rest in between training training sessions. So I like to per personally incorporate them either in the beginning or the end of my exercise kind of just as a bonus, sometimes both. Like, I might warm up with some calves. And then do my whole whatever it is back in bicep day. I'm just throwing something out there. And then end with calves. You know, it's a good way to kinda change stuff up and whatever. I I personally like doing tabs and forums, and I know some people don't like it, but I like it. So it it's kinda fun to to throw in there. But this kind of falls into the whole restaurant recovery thing because restaurant recovery affects your mental state basically for just to to sum it up, that you're really going to want to focus on form. This is because you do not or you really, really do not want to hinder for your forearm because that is going to hinder any other arm exercises. You know, maybe your grip strength, like, who who knows? But the The form is gonna is what's going to let you effectively target each individual part of your form. There's multiple different parts. I'm not gonna go over the scientific aspect of it or the scientific names of each part and today and we're just gonna cover the basics and the need to know need to know type of stuff right now. You're going to really want, in my opinion, to focus on the isolation of your form, and not overdoing the weight. In my opinion, I I've seen significant growth in my forums over the years. Just from doing the exercises. I'm about I'm about to list with fifteen to twenty pound dumbbells. I mean, I I actually when I first started, it was more like ten to fifteen pound dumbbells. You don't need a whole bunch of of weight if you're properly isolating your forearms and you're just focused on the growth at least at this moment. So as far as the exercises go, there are I mean, you can go I'll I'll explain these after I list them, but you can also Google them for a visual representation and everything. But there are risk curls, reverse risk curls, ammar curls, and then different types of grip strength exercises. So that those are, like, farmers walks where you're you're holding a lot of weight and you're really having to, you know, hold it for a long time. These are Denny stones, plate pinches, and then different types of grips grip squeezes. Excuse me. There are all types of different grip tools that you can and go down a real deep rabbit hole as far as that goes, hammer curls. That kinda goes against the whole isolation of the forearm thing, but that's gonna really hit your brachialis and that is what kinda ties into your forearm. And so it is essential. You're gonna wanna hold the dumbbells with your neutral grip, which means your palm's facing each other. I like to do this standing up and isolating my or or pinning my elbow to my sides, basically. And you're curling the weight up towards your shoulder, while keeping your palms facing each other. And I guess your knuckles facing outward. Thumbs. I guess yeah. If you're looking down, your thumbs would be on top of your hands. So besides that, reverse risk curls. So those are similar to regular risk curls, but your palms will be fake facing down. You're isolating your forearm to specifically just try and move your wrist. And flex the muscles within your forearm. Risk curls, you can use your barbell or dumbbells. You can sit on a bench with your forearms resting on your thighs and your palms facing up. Then you curl the weight up by flexing your wrist and slowly lowering it back down. I personally just especially if it's, like, a heavier, like, fifteen or twenty pounder, or whatever, I like to I'll actually kneel next to a flat bench as long as it's not hindering anyone else's ability to exercise or, you know, if they're there's a bunch of people doing bench. I won't do this, but I will kind of put my elbow, my arm, with palm facing upward across the bench with my elbow on the bench, my wrist hanging off the edge of the bench, which really and then I'm all put lightly put my other hand like I say, I'm doing this with my right right arm at the time. I'll use my left hand to hold down lightly my my forearm. So because my wrist is hanging over, it is it's forcing me to isolate and just curl and basically, you're curling the weight with just your wrist movement. And I will I will go all the way up to as far as I can and really flexing and squeezing and then slowly lower down and I try to also do a slight negative in that motion. You're gonna really feel this. I like to do If it's lighter weight, I like to do three sets of ten or so. If it's heavier weight, I I kinda like to do, like, four sets of six or four sets of eight really. So as far as what I was just explaining with the wrist curl and your your palm facing upward, you can you can hit it like that, and then you can literally turn turn your forearm in your hand. Let's see. Ninety degrees. That's facing upward and you can you can curl upward while just isolating that we're only moving your wrist and you can rotate your arm another ninety degrees with your palm facing down. That's that reverse wrist curl. And you're really gonna be hitting it hard. It does not take a lot to to really get your your farms worked out and Yeah. So Like I said, you're gonna wanna stick to consistency. This means incorporating this. I I like to actually write write my workout plans out. I mean, some people are like, no. I just do I know what I I'm doing, and I just do it every day. But Writing it down really is is one is gonna let you keep track of the sets and reps you actually did, not just what you thought you did or whatever. But it's also going to let you go back in, like, two weeks time or whatever with with any exercise and have a reference point of the weight you're you're using. And even if you jot down how you're feeling with that weight, like, you could be like, well, Like, if you're starting out bench, you're like, well, I was you know, I hit one thirty five on bench, and I'm really proud of that. And but it was a struggle. It was like so, I mean, my spotter almost had to help me. It was, you know, it was really fighting. You know? And then two or three weeks down the road, you're like, oh, what? I hit one forty, but it was it went pretty smooth. You know? And you can it's a really cool way to see your growth over time, especially in time doing your you start feeling down with your training because at some point that normally that happens for people, especially when following a program, the, I guess, the monotony and you're, like, feeling like you're not making a whole lot of progress, but you actually are. That's kind of my my rant as far as that goes. You want to focus on progressive overload, which is gradually increasing your weight that you're lifting over time. To constantly challenge your muscles and stimulate that growth. So like I said, if you start doing these That's why you that's why you write this stuff down. If you start doing these exercises with tens and you're like, man, this is really struggle. I was burnt out. Like, my hands were trembling when I was done and I I felt super weak. I mean, that's a that's a good workout. But then later on, you're like, okay. Well, It's been, what, however long, two weeks a month, however however long it takes you. You're like, man, I I feel I can do fifteen pounders now. And you go up to fifteen pounders and you you start doing that. So that that's that progressive overload to continually challenge yourself. So that's about it. As far as forum exercises go, another fun thing that I left out is you can a lot of baseball players do this and I think wrestlers too. I'm not super familiar, but you'll they'll get, like, a five gallon bucket from Loewser Home Depot, you know, whatever hardware store you have. And fill it up with rice, and just the cheapest rice that you can find or whatever. Some people do a sandwich, but I don't I don't know. I don't I like rice. Well, I like to do it with rice. And you kinda just like you force your hand down into the rice. And you just kinda move it around. It's, you know, it's kinda like that isolate isolating the wrist thing. You can you have some, like, elbow flaring in there or whatever doesn't really matter. But you're basically the rice is adding resistance to the movement of your hand within the rice, which is going to work your forearms. So some people do kind of like a a twisting motion with their hands or or kind of like a sneaky motion through there or or different swirls like trying to move the tire massive rice like you're stirring stirring it without any water in it. All of those are good exercises. You can do those forwards and backwards and all kinds of stuff. So that's a very cheap way, especially if you don't have a lot of Sorry. Especially if you don't have a lot of access to workout equipment or, you know, different types of grip strength tools. Well, thank you all so much for listening. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend. That is the number one way to help the podcast. And it's greatly greatly appreciated. The other way is to leave a rating and review. Like usual, I'm gonna be putting the websites information down in the description as well as some other links you might find useful. And, yeah, I will be talking to y'all next week and thank you all so much. You'll have a great rest of your week. Alright. Bye.