Given that I had numerous requests for Glen’s forearm routine, I was personally curious about it, and the fact that Glen’s universally beloved by you people, I figured it was high time to post his forearm routine.  As such, here it is.  I’d tell you to enjoy, but you might just want to get out your hankies so you can mop up all of the teary eyes that Glen seems to inspire.

Forearms: there’s really not much to say about them. Back in the sixth grade my gym teacher said that if you opened and closed your hand all the way over and over it would build up your wrists and forearms which, supposedly, would help with volleyball. I could give a rat’s ass about volleyball but I thought it would be cool to have massive, ripped forearms and spent years opening and closing my hands all the time. If I was reading a book with one hand, I was opening and closing the other one. I had already been lifting weights for four or five years when I stopped using straps on my deadlifts for about seven years and that helped to make my forearms bigger. I also like hammer curls and reverse curls. I don’t do anything out of the ordinary with them, I just do them. Years of heavy manual labour also played a role. And I like to do pushups on my fingertips. Even handstand pushups against the wall on my fingertips.

Farmer’s walks are one of my favourite strongman events. I practice them with 260 lbs per hand for 10 or more sets of 20 or so steps. I don’t bother practicing the turn because the turn ends up being the hardest part of the event in competition whether you’ve practiced the fuck out of it or not so I’d rather just work on the raw power involved. Wrist curls are probably what put my forearms over the edge though. At first I did them for sets of 15-25 reps just like everyone else does. But doing what everybody else does just gets you the same results as everybody else, which typically means sweet fuck all. So I started upping the weight, practicing wrist curls for lots of sets of low reps, sometimes even singles. That went well for a while but I stalled out after a while. What I eventually found was that starting over with the empty 45 lb bar and aiming for 50 reps at a time let me progress almost forever. The first time I tried it I think I got 30-something reps with the empty bar. A week later that number was even higher, and before I knew it I was at 50 reps so I added five lbs the next time I tried it. The weights kept climbing upward at every workout for a while and if I ever got only 40-something reps I’d just stick with that weight until I could get 50.

This type of workout is good for the tendons because of the increased blood flow. Believe it or not, tendons have a lot to do with grip strength and aside from certain feats of strength, most of the things you’ll do with your hands and wrists take a lot of endurance moreso than strength. Either way, since you’re always increasing the weight you’re building strength anyway. A lot of the anonymous retards will whine about piddly shit details like certain rep ranges being for strength while others are for endurance. This is because they have no real life experience and believe everything the read on the Internet. It’s all bullshit. Besides, when you make your wrists and forearms used to doing 50 or more reps with a significant weight, lower rep sets feel easy. And when they feel easy, they are easy and that means they can get heavier over a shorter period of time. After six months to a year of progressively heavier sets of 50 reps, if you decide to switch to doing 10 sets of five for a while your poundages will increase like you’ve never seen before. The foundation you’ll have built from all the high reps will allow you to get a lot more out the heavier weight, lower rep sets than you otherwise would have. This has a lot to do with Golgi tendon reflexes and other scientific mumbo jumbo that I’m sure plenty of fuckheads know a lot more about than I do which is fine.

Fifty reps doesn’t have to mean only one set either. Do as many sets as you want. After a month or so it’s not that hard to do multiple sets of high reps with the wrist curl. More sets are better than less sets and you can eventually do these at every workout if you want to.
As far as form goes, it’s a wrist curl so if you can’t figure it out you’re probably so fucking stupid that you can’t even remember how to spell your own name and therefore need to post anonymously when you use the Internet. But for the sake of completion I’ll explain how I like to do them.
My wrists are on the edge of the bench, my hands hanging over. The backs of my forearms rest on the bench and I use my thighs to squeeze them together so that my elbows are touching each other, which neccessitates my hands gripping the bar pretty close together. Range of motion is all the way down and all the way up. I don’t roll the bar all the way down to my fingertips excpet on the last rep when I’ll hold it at the end of my fingertips for as long as I can. Anyway, setting up your wrist curls this way is much easier on your wrists than having your forearms resting on top of your thighs like everyone else does. Everyone else uses fuck all weight for fuck all reps so fuck them anyway. You’ll avoid the cracking and popping in your wrists that a lot of people get when they do wrist curls in the conventional way.

There you have it. A simple exercise and a simple formula. So simple that it’ll be overlooked or discarded as nonsense by most “lifters” who were never destined to have extraordinary forearms in the first place anyhow. They can fuck right off.

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