How to Build Big Forearms
Aside from your neck, the muscles that get exposed to the world more than any other are your forearms. So it’s a probably a good idea for them to be jacked, or least look halfway decent.
A lot of guys with average to above average genetics will never need to do any direct forearm work and their forearms will grow just fine from presses and pulls. The rest of us won’t be so lucky.
It’s funny because the common message preached to skinny hardgainers is to forget isolation training and only focus on compound lifts. This is true at the beginning, but after training for many years isolation work for small bodyparts like the neck, forearms and calves actually becomes more important to the hardgainer than it does to everyone else. Genetically average little dudes with tiny joints will never build big forearms and calves to any appreciable size with training them directly and with quite a lot of volume.
Over the course of many years I went from 147 pounds to 231 pounds yet my calves and forearms showed less progress than any other part of my body. I’ve seen this time and time again over the years. It wasn’t until I started hammer my forearms hard and with high volume and frequency that they actually got anywhere above the size of a teenage girls.
And that’s the first rule of building big forearms… That the forearms can tolerate and will need a lot of work to show dramatic improvements.
Train them three to four days per week for anywhere from 4-10 sets per day. If you do three full body workouts per week include them at the end of each workout. If you do an upper/lower split four days per week, again hit them every day.
I recommend breaking forearm training down into the following components:
