Likewise, before we dive into the training tips themselves, let’s also review our key training volume landmarks and relate them to training the forearms:
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MV = Maintenance Volume: |
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The forearms can actually be sustained with no direct work so long as pulling work for the back is still done. Thus, you can actually put forearms on the back burner in most cases by not training them at all, and likely risk no size, or no size you can’t easily and quickly get back when you start training them again. |
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MEV = Minimum Effective Volume: |
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Most people have never trained forearms with direct focus, so their MEV is around 2 sets per week. Individuals with significant experience will find their forearm MEVs to be around the 8 set per week mark. That being said, the forearms recover very quickly, and training them once a week is unlikely to lead to consistent gains past the beginner stage. At least 2 weekly sessions are recommended (4 sets each to hit MEV for the well-trained), and 3-5 weekly sessions are probably going to result in much better gains for this quickly recovering muscle group. |
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MAV = Maximum Adaptive Volume: |
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The maximum adaptive volume of a single session of any trained muscle group is still speculative, but research suggests it’s probably no lower than 4 working sets per session and no higher than 12 working sets per session in most intermediates. When you design your program and progressions, having lots of sessions with much fewer than 4 working sets per muscle group per week for multiple weeks on end might not be very efficient, and you might benefit from combining a few of these lower volume sessions to get the same volume but in fewer weekly sessions. Also, not exceeding 12 sets per session per muscle group for more than a few weeks is probably a good idea. |
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MRV = Maximum Recoverable Volume: |
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The MRV depends highly on the number of sessions per week. With 2 sessions, the average intermediate MRV for forearms might be around 15 sets per week. This is lower than with most muscles because the forearms take so much fatigue form pretty much every other kind of training and daily life. With three sessions, it’s closer to 20 sets per week. With 4 sessions, it’s around 25 sets, and with 5 or 6 weekly sessions, it might not be much higher, because with that many sessions, weekly recovery may become the limiting factor. You might be the person that has an even higher MRV, but that’s only something you’ll figure out by experimenting in your own training. Forearms have the unfortunate circumstance of being rather growth-resistant due to their likely slower twitch fiber types and other factors, but they also have relatively low MRVs because, technically, their use during the day and in other muscle group training (such as back, for example) amounts to something like junk volume. It’s not quite intense enough or close enough to their failure points to cause the best growth, but it’s a lot of work, so it adds lots of fatigue. |
EXERCISES
- Barbell Standing Wrist Curls
- Dumbbell Standing Wrist Curls
- Dumbbell Bench Wrist Curls
- Cable Wrist Curls
Note: Gripper exercises (such as the Captains of Crush Grippers) can definitely be used to grow the forearms. If you use them, we recommend working in the 10-30 rep range and making sure to open the gripper as wide as you can and hold it for a second in the fully closed position. This may be humbling but will ensure the proper workloads and contraction types occur to maximize growth.
VARIATION
Within a training session, we recommend including no more than 1 forearm exercise, as doing more than 1 forearm movement in one session is likely just a needless burning of potential exercise variations you can save for later days and mesocycles. It’s also needless to do more than one exercise per session because forearms have relatively low volume needs and tolerances in the context of an otherwise voluminous upper body program. Within a single week (microcycle) of training, we recommend between 2 and 3 different forearm exercises. For example, if you train forearms 3x a week, you can do a heavy barbell wrist curl on one day, a lighter barbell wrist curl on the next day, and a dumbbell wrist curl on the last day for 2 total exercises in the week. Because you want to keep exercises variations fresh for when you need to change exercises (through injury or staleness, for example), you should use as few exercises per week (and thus, per mesocycle, as we recommend keeping the same exercises in every week of each meso) as you can to get the job done. If you can just do a few more sets of barbell wrist curls and get a great workout, there’s no reason to switch to dumbbell wrist curls, for example. If you’re doing an exercise, there should be a reason for it.
Lastly, how do you know when it’s time to switch out a given exercise from your rotation to another exercise in your list of effective choices? The decision is based on answering just a few questions about the exercise you’re currently using:
- Are you still making gains in rep strength on the exercise?
- Is the exercise causing any aches or pains that are connective tissue related? And are these getting worse with each week or accumulating over multiple weeks?
- Is there a phasic need for the exercise to change? In other words, is the exercise appropriate for the rep range you’re trying to use it for? Single-arm dumbbell wrist curls for sets of 5-10 might bother your wrists, but standing barbell wrist curls might not.
- Are you getting a good mind-muscle connection on the exercise, or is it feeling stale and annoying to do?
If you are still hitting PRs on the exercise, it’s not causing any undue pains, you’re getting a good mind-muscle connection, and there’s no other need to change it, then don’t change it! If this means you keep an exercise around for up to a year or more, so be it! But if an exercise isn’t yielding any more PRs for a whole meso (especially on a muscle gain or maintenance phase), if it’s hurting you in the “bad” way, if it feels super stale, and/or if you have to dump it because it’s not appropriate to an upcoming rep range target, then you should replace it. Many times, the questions will fall on both sides, and then it’s up to you to make a wise choice considering all the 4 variables above.
RANGE OF MOTION
The forearm muscles control not just your palms, but your fingers as well. This is why it’s probably important to let wrist curls roll all the way down to your fingertips and have your palm bend all the way back before returning up and crunching your fist while flexing at the wrist. Some people experience some pain when flexing at the wrist too extremely, so those affected should avoid such excessive flexion. It’s easy to make tiny cuts to ROM when wrist curling, and you can seem to hit lots of PRs in a row by making such cuts, since the movements get easier. But remember that you’re not simply on the quest for PRs; you’re using PRs to proxy muscle growth, and using a full ROM that stimulates all motor units and provides tension under stretch is the best way to cause such growth.
LOADING
In general, like all muscles, the forearms benefit from weights in the 30%-85% 1RM range, which in many people roughly translates to a weight that results in between 5 and 30 reps on a first set taken to failure. We can split this range into heavy (5-10,) moderate (10-20), and light (20-30) categories, as there are tradeoffs to make between all of them.
The first point on loading is that the forearms, like most muscles, seem to benefit from some training in all three of the rep ranges listed above. Because the moderate (10-20 rep) range often offers the best tradeoff between stimulus, fatigue, injury risk, and slow/fast fiber specificity, and mind-muscle connection, an argument can be made that a first-time program design could have most weekly working sets for the forearms in this range, perhaps up to about 50% of them. The other 50% can perhaps be split evenly between the heavy (5-10) and light (20-30) rep ranges, as loading range diversity has been shown to be a potential benefit in its own right.
We must note that very few people seem to respond very well to forearm training in the 5-10 rep range, so while such a range should be experimented with early on in forearm training and if/when a plateau in gains presents itself, it’s perhaps not mandated for inclusion in most people’s training most of the time. Additionally, forearm training in the 20-30 range seems very productive for most lifters, even perhaps as productive as forearm training in the 10-20 range.
When constructing a weekly training plan, it’s probably a good idea to train the heavy ranges before the lighter ranges. Because both types of training cause fatigue, they all interfere with each other to some extent. However, the muscle and connective tissue damage from heavier training is likely more substantial and presents a higher risk of injury if some damage already exists from earlier training. Thus, if you do sets of 5-10 on Monday and (nearly always) sustain some form of micro-tearing, sets of 10-20 on Wednesday are lower in absolute force magnitude and are unlikely to cause the micro-tearing to expand into a notable injury. On the other hand, if you’re pre-damaged from lots of sets of 10-20 on Monday, going even heavier in such a state on Wednesday in the 5-10 range is a bit more likely to result in injury. Thus, a potential sequencing of heavy-moderate-light during the week might be advisable, with a day or two of extra rest after the light session and before the next heavy session to make sure most damage has been healed and another productive week can begin.
A sample arrangement of exercises, sets, and loads can look something like this:
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Monday |
Wednesday |
Friday |
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Dumbbell Bench Wrist Curls: 2 sets, 5-10 reps |
Barbell Standing Wrist Curls: 4 sets, 10-20 reps |
Cable Wrist Curls: 4 sets, 20-30 reps |
Based on your personal responses to each of the main rep ranges, you can adjust how much volume you perform in any of them. For example, if you notice that you get a better stimulus (pumps, soreness, mind-muscle connection, etc.) and lower fatigue (joint stress, joint soreness, etc.) in some of the ranges vs. others, you can do more sets in those ranges and a bit less in others, though you should in most cases still include at least some work in the least productive ranges. For example, you might find that neither 5-10 nor 10-20 rep ranges work very well for your forearm training, so you might only do a few sets of both in most weeks and do the vast majority of your sets in the 20-30 range.
REST TIMES
When determining how long to rest between any two sets in training, our goal is for enough rest to be taken such that the next set is at least close to maximally productive. How can we ensure this? By answering 4 basic questions about our recovery status:
- Has the target muscle locally recovered enough to do at least 5 reps on the next set?
- Has the nervous system recovered enough to remove it as a limiting factor to target muscle performance?
- Has the cardiorespiratory system recovered enough to remove it as a limiting factor to target muscle performance?
- Have synergist muscles in the exercise being performed recovered enough to remove them as a limiting factor to target muscle performance?
It might take only 1-2 minutes to recover very well (let’s say, 90%) on all of those factors, but because set to set recovery is asymptotic in nature, it might take another 3 minutes to get to 95% recovery and another 10 minutes more to get to 99% recovery. Since you only have so much time to spend in the gym, 10 “90% recovered sets” in 45 minutes of training is a much more anabolic stimulus than only 3 “99% recovered” sets in that same amount of time. Thus, our recommendation is to make sure you can clearly check all 4 boxes of recovery above, but to not wait much longer than what can be considered “very good” recovery in the incredibly inefficient quest for “near perfect recovery.”
Here’s an example of what can be considered “very good” recovery between sets of forearm training. Before you do another set of cable wrist curls, ask yourself:
- Are my forearms still burning from the last set, or do they feel ok again?
- Do I feel like I can push hard with my forearms again, and I am mentally ready for another hard set, or do I need more time to rest?
- Is my breathing more or less back to normal, or is it still very heavy?
- Are my traps still fatigued from holding the wrist curl bar while standing, or are they ready to support my forearms in the upcoming set of wrist curls?
If you can get the green light on all of these, you’re probably ready to do another set, and waiting much longer will almost certainly not be of benefit.
Forearms are distal to pretty much every major body structure, so they have very few #4 limiting synergists. Because they have few or no synergists, their training doesn’t generate a lot of central or cardiorespiratory fatigue, so that cuts #2 and #3 down considerably. The result is that much forearm training only has to contend with #1’s local recovery, which is usually very rapid in the well-vascularized forearms. This means that many people can perform another productive forearm set when the burn in the forearms from the last set goes away, which can mean rest times of as low as 10 seconds! That being said, the most important consideration is to take the rest time you need, and not copy someone else’s, rush the process, or sit around needlessly for minutes after all 4 factors are good to go for your next set to commence.
FREQUENCY
There are two main considerations for determining training frequency. The first is the duration of the increase in muscle growth seen after a bout of training between MEV and MRV. If such an increase in muscle growth lasts 7 days, then perhaps a once a week frequency is optimal. If such an increase lasts only a day, then perhaps 6 days a week for the same muscle group is much better. While direct research on muscle growth timecourses is very limited, it seems that typical training might cause a reliable 24-48 hour increase in muscle growth. This would mean that if muscle growth elevation was the only variable of concern with regards to frequency, we should train every muscle 3-6 times per week.
However, the second main consideration on determining training frequency is recovery. A single bout of training between MEV and MRV causes muscle growth to occur, but it also presents some degree of fatigue. If we are to progress in training and allow adaptations to fully take hold over days and weeks, we must allow enough time to elapse between overloading sessions for at least most fatigue to dissipate. On average, the exact amount of fatigue dissipation must be at least enough to allow performance to return to baseline or higher, such than an overload can be presented. In other words, if you can normally barbell wrist curl 95 for 15 reps, asking yourself “when should my next forearm workout be after this last one” can be answered by “when will you be recovered enough to be able to wrist curl at least 95 for 15 reps?” The timecourse of fatigue is usually a bit longer than that of muscle growth, unfortunately, so that for most people, recovery, not muscle growth cessation, will be the limiting factor on frequency. In most per-session MEV-MRV training volumes, fatigue will take between 1-2 days to come back down enough to restore or improve on past performance, and that highly depends on the muscle in question and even the exercises used.
How do you determine what training frequency is appropriate for you? You can start by training your forearms at per-session MEV volumes. After each session, you note when soreness has abated and when you feel recovered enough psychologically to attempt another overloading workout. When you’re ready, and no later, go back to the gym and train forearms again, with volumes just a bit higher than MEV (using the RP Set Progression algorithm from the Training Volume Landmarks for Muscle Growth article). If you’re recovering on time, keep coming back and training your forearms as often as you have been. If you notice that you need more time to recover, add a day to your next post-forearm-training window. If you’re recovering faster than you thought you could, train a bit more often. After a mesocycle of such adjustments, you will have a rough but very good guess as to what your average forearm training frequency can be for most of your programs going forward. In fact, your frequency will not only be tailored exactly to your responses, but you’ll be pretty sure it’s close to optimal because it was literally derived from how fast you can recover; which is the very primary variable that determines frequency.
Just so that you have some expectation of where to start, most individuals can recover from forearm training at a timecourse that allows for 3-6 sessions of forearms per week at MEV-MRV volumes. However, only through direct experimentation on yourself can you tell where in this range is best for you and if maybe you’re even outside of this range. Just remember that so long as you’re recovered to train again (can perform at or above normal levels), training is a better idea than waiting to train, because higher frequency programs, at least in the short term, have shown to generate more muscle growth than needlessly lower ones.
To improve your training frequency, you can alternate exercise selections between successive forearm workouts. For example, if you do barbell wrist curls on one day, you might do dumbbell wrist curls or cable wrist curls the next day, and so on. This rotation of slightly different exercises and movement patterns can take repeated stress off of very small and specific parts of your muscles and connective tissues, which might reduce chronic injury risk exposure.
PERIODIZATION
There are a few relevant timescales in periodization:
- The repetition (1-9 seconds)
- The set (5-30 repetitions)
- The exercise (1-5 sets)
- The session (2-6 exercises)
- The day (0-2 sessions)
- The microcycle (usually 1 week of training)
- The mesocycle (3-12 weeks)
- The block (1-4 mesocycles)
- The macrocycle (1-4 blocks)
We’ve already covered the most important details on most of these timescales, so in this section, we’ll focus on a brief understanding of how to manipulate training over a typical mesocycle and training block.
A mesocycle is composed of two phases: the accumulation phase and the deload phase. The accumulation phase lasts as long as it takes to hit systemic MRV, which, because fatigue accumulates in MEV+ training, has to happen at some point. For beginners with very high recovery abilities, it can take up to 12 weeks of increasingly more demanding training for systemic MRV to be reached and a deload to be required. For very advanced lifters that have very strong, large, and volume-resistant muscles, it can take only 3-4 weeks of accumulation training to reach systemic MRV and need to deload. The deload phase is designed to bring down the fatigue from the accumulation phase, and it usually only lasts a week or so (one microcycle).
When you begin a mesocycle of training, you should probably begin at or close to your MEV for all the muscle groups you’d like to improve during that mesocycle, for reasons described extensively in our book on the subject of training volume. Week to week, you can manipulate working sets by using the RP Set Progression algorithm from the Training Volume Landmarks for Muscle Growth article). You should seek to keep reps stable from week to week while letting your RIR decline from a 3 or 4 RIR start until it gets down to 0 (for exercises that don’t threaten the bar falling on you) or 1 (for those that do) in the last week of training. The way you keep the reps stable as RIR falls is by adding weight to the exercises you’re using. How much weight to add is a matter of an educated guess on your part. You want to add enough weight to get your target RIR with the same reps as last week. For example, if you did 100lbs last week for 10 reps on your first set of an exercise at 2 RIR, how much should you do next week to get 10 reps again but at 1 RIR? Well, you might think that adding 2.5lbs would be too easy, and you could honestly get 11 reps with that next week at 1 RIR, but adding 10lbs might require you to push to 0 RIR to get 10 reps, so you would just add 5lbs and that will probably take you where you need to be. If you’re making very rapid gains on an exercise, you might have a few weeks here and there where even though you increased weight by a bit, your RIR didn’t decline. You might have hit 8 reps at 100lbs at 3 RIR last week, and then hit 8 reps again at 3 RIR with 105lbs this week! This is a good thing, and lots of these weeks are how beginners can sometimes crank out up to 12 weeks of accumulation. Since getting to failure too soon is MUCH WORSE than getting there a bit slower, we recommend being conservative on nearly all weekly weight additions.
If you can’t realistically add weight, you can add reps. This might happen when, for example, you are using the 25lb dumbbells one week and then having to do the 30lbers next week, wildly slashing your reps. Just remember to stay within your general rep range and not leave it in any given meso. If you start at sets of about 5 reps, don’t add any more reps than will give you sets of 10, because that will take you out of the 5-10 range and no longer fulfill the needs of your training program in the way it was intended. If you start to exit a range by adding reps, add weight to take yourself back into that range, even if the increments are big and take you all the way down to the bottom of the range. Yes, this might mean that last week you were doing 20 reps with the 20lb dumbbells on your first set, and this week you’re back to only 10 reps with the 25lbers at the same or one less RIR, but that’s proper training!
Once you cannot tie previous reps in at least two consecutive sessions for a given muscle group, you have likely hit its local MRV, and need to reduce its training volume. Our recommendation is to take the next planned session with half of the planned working sets, half of the planned reps, and half of the load for recovery. In the session after, resume your load progression from before, but start at a number of sets halfway between where you started the meso and your MRV set number, and an RIR of around 2. Thus, for example, if you hit 100lbs for 10 reps on a first set last session (6 total sets in the session for that muscle group), whereas the week before, you hit 95lbs for 12 reps, your next workout can be 50lbs for 3 sets of about 5 reps. Then, next week, you resume with 105lbs, but shoot for 2 RIR and do 4 sets total, because you started the meso at 2 sets, and 4 is halfway between 2 and 6 sets. Continue to train normally after that until and unless you hit MRV again.
Systemic MRV is when you’re training so hard that your sleep quality declines, your appetite falls, and you might get sick more often. It’s also when nearly all of your muscles start to hit local MRVs at about the same time. Once that happens (and be honest with yourself when it does), stop the accumulation phase and begin the deload phase.
The deload can be done many ways, but our recommendation is to take sets to MEV for the whole week. The load should be week 1’s load for the first half of the week and ½ of week 1’s load for the second half. The reps should be roughly half of all week 1’s reps for all sets during the deload week. This makes the deload VERY EASY, which is the whole point, since hard training doesn’t bring down fatigue! You should feel refreshed and be craving hard training toward the end of your deload week if you’re setting it up correctly.
Those are the basics of periodization over the mesocycle. The training block is a sequence of mesocycles strung together for one unifying purpose. For example, a muscle gain block may be 3 mesocycles of 6 weeks each, one after another, with weight gain the goal for all 18 of those total weeks, or a fat loss block might be 2 mesocycles of 5 weeks long during which weight loss is the goal for all 10 of those weeks.
Though we can potentially alter all training variables over a training block, frequency, exercise selection, and loading are definitely noteworthy.
Frequency Periodization
When you start a training block, your MEVs are very low and so are your weekly MRVs. Thus, you can fit your total training volume relatively easily into lower frequencies, such as 2x per week per muscle group, for example. As training progresses and you start your next meso, not only do your per-session MEVs go up, but your weekly MRVs go up as well, making fitting all your training into just a few sessions more difficult. As well, you’re now quite used to the exercises, and recovery between sessions occurs much faster, allowing a higher frequency microcycle to be much more realistic. At this point, you can increase your frequency a bit, perhaps to an average of something like 3x per muscle group, for example. In the last one or two mesos, your per-session MEVs are very high and your per-week MRVs even higher. To really get the best gains, another bump in frequency is recommended, and you might go to 4x or so training per muscle group, and perhaps even higher.
Unfortunately, super high frequencies might not be the most sustainable for a couple of reasons. First, muscles heal faster than connective tissues, and if you train with very high frequencies, sometimes your connective tissue recovery can lag behind your muscle recovery, which may set you up for injuries if unabated. Secondly, the sheer weekly volume that higher frequencies let you do productively might cause so much fatigue escalation as to not be sustainable for longer than a mesocycle or two. Thus, after training for a meso or two at your highest frequency, you might end the training block and seek to reduce the very high fatigue levels you have accumulated, in part by starting whatever phase you start next at lower frequencies.
Exercise Selection Periodization
For normal exercise selection decisions, you can just follow the 4-part exercise deletion and replacement guidelines in the variation section above. But as you add sessions from meso to meso with a climbing frequency, you’ll need to consider adding exercises. Yes, you can repeat exercises a few times in the week with different loads, but we recommend doing this sparingly, and more often adding in new exercises when you add new sessions as frequency climbs. Thus, you might start with an exercise on Monday and a different one on Thursday in a 2x meso, but when you move to 3x, you might have to add a new exercise on Friday, keeping the Monday exercise the same and moving the Thursday exercise to Wednesday. Because fatigue and wear and tear increase with each meso in a block, we recommend adding less systemically disruptive exercises more often than adding more disruptive ones. For example, you might consider adding some dumbbell bench wrist curls on that Friday 3x session but adding barbell standing wrist curls to an already fatiguing week of forearm training might be overkill. Yes, you can add very tough movements as you go, but we recommend against it in most cases. Thus, you start with pretty much only or mostly basic, high-stress moves such as barbell standing wrist curls and dumbbell standing wrist curls earlier in the block, and later on add dumbbell bench wrist curls, cable wrist curls, and other such less fatiguing exercises as you add in sessions to expand frequency over the training block.
Loading Periodization
Whatever exercises you’ve carried over from one meso to the next should be done in the same rep ranges as they were done in the last mesos. For example, if you did barbell standing wrist curls in the 5-10 rep range on a first set in the last meso, in the next meso, you should continue your loading progression to stay in that same rep range, which often means just adding small increments of weight from where you last left off in the last meso, or lightening up the weight just enough to get similar reps at 3-4 RIR again in the first week. But for new exercises added in each meso as frequency goes up, we recommend adding in the moderate (10-20) and light (20-30) rep ranges instead of the heavy (5-10) range. This recommendation occurs for two reasons. First, as you take on more wear and tear and fatigue, adding more 5-10 rep movements might cause a large increase in injury risk, especially now that you’re asking your body to perform with such heavy loads with even less recovery time between sessions. Secondly, very high rep (20-30) training seems to cause robust gains over a meso or two, but in part because your body adapts to buffering metabolites so quickly, might not work nearly as well for much longer. Thus, you may want to start with heavier training in the first meso of a block, keep it for all remaining mesos, and add in lighter training with new sessions as you go, which also pairs well with the selection of less fatiguing exercises. Here’s an example of how that might look for the forearms:
|
|
Meso 1 |
Meso 2 |
Meso 3 |
|
Mon |
Barbell Standing Wrist Curls (5-10) |
Barbell Standing Wrist Curls (5-10) |
Barbell Standing Wrist Curls (5-10) |
|
Wed |
x |
Dumbbell Standing Wrist Curls (10-20) |
Dumbbell Standing Wrist Curls (10-20) |
|
Thurs |
Dumbbell Standing Wrist Curls (10-20) |
x |
x |
|
Fri |
x |
Dumbbell Bench Wrist Curls (10-20) |
Dumbbell Bench Wrist Curls (10-20) |
|
Sat |
x |
x |
Cable Wrist Curls (20-30) |
Once you’ve done a whole training block, you can do a mesocycle of low frequency (2x) training at MV with mostly 5-10 rep ranges and compound movements to resensitize your muscles to volume and growth again. This meso can take about a month and can be good to pair with maintenance eating to bring down any diet fatigue you might have from hard dieting in the last block. If you don’t have any real diet fatigue, you can instead take around 2 weeks of active rest (sometimes just one week if you count the deload after your last meso), where you train with 1x frequency for every muscle, with only about 2 working sets per muscle per session, and with weights that are around 50% of your 5-10 range, but doing them for only 5-10 reps per set. This ultra-easy training can make you ready for another whole block of training in the gym and can even be replaced with no training at all if you’re feeling really beat up or tired. Once you’ve taken this easy time, you’re probably ready to give another training block a go!
TRAINING MODALITIES
Straight Sets
Straight sets are sets performed to 0-4 RIR, with enough rest time to recover all 4 limiting factors (see the rest time section above for details).
Forearms respond well to straight sets, but as we’ll see later, they are so synergistically and systemically low in set to set recovery that nearly all straight sets end up as myoreps anyway.
Down Sets
Down sets are straight sets, but with less weight (usually 10-20% less) than the previous straight sets. By lowering the weight, you can keep reps over 5 per set, and/or keep the mind-muscle connection high and keep technique excellent to continue to have a high stimulus to fatigue ratio in every set of that exercise.
Very rarely needed with forearm training, since the mind-muscle connection is easy, technique is simple, and fatigue between sets is so low.
Controlled Eccentrics and Pauses
Concentric, eccentric, and isometric phases of each exercise can be between half a second and 3 seconds long and still confer near-optimal effects on hypertrophy. In some cases, slowing down eccentrics and extending pauses can enhance technique, mind-muscle connection, and safety of the exercise.
Slowing down the eccentric, holding the peak contraction, and especially milking the painful stretch at the bottom are very powerful for forearm growth and probably should be the default training approach for forearms in many cases. It’s very easy to just jostle the wrists around and claim it as forearm training. In order to keep technique stable and track performance, forearm reps should usually be very well standardized and controlled.
Giant Sets
Giant sets give you a certain weight to lift, an RIR range to hit (usually 0-4 RIR), and a goal of total reps over as many sets as it takes. An example is aiming to do 100lbs for however many sets it takes to get 60 total reps, while taking normal rest between each set. Such an approach can take the focus off of having to match or exceed the per-set reps you did last week, and can thus let you super-focus on technique and the mind-muscle connection, thus potentially improving both and getting more out of the training with exercises that can demand lots of technique and mind-muscle connection to be effective. If you’d like to be super precise in counting sets for your volume landmarks, we recommend counting giant sets at 2/3 of the contribution of straight sets, such that if you did 6 total sets to get to your giant set rep target, you can count that as 4 sets of “straight set equivalency” in terms of stimulus and fatigue. This discount is because with a higher focus on technique and mind-muscle connection and a lower focus on getting as many reps per set as possible, giant sets likely don’t cause as much fatigue as straight sets.
Forearm training technique is simple, but so many people are unused to it, and can thus greatly benefit from giant set use, especially in their first several months of forearm training.
Myoreps
Myoreps are just like straight sets in that they must check all 4 recovery boxes before doing another set. However, they are different in two ways. First, while the first set is usually between 10-20 reps (0-2 RIR), the next multiple sets only rest long enough to get between 5 and 10 reps each. This is to maximize the ratio of effective (near-failure) reps to total reps over the multiple sets. Secondly, for all of those successive sets to register the highest number of effective reps per set, the local recovery factor (the muscle itself) must be by far the most limiting, so that successive sets are not limited by the nervous system, the lungs, and other muscles, allowing the final reps of each set to recruit and tense the fastest and most growth-prone motor units. For this to be possible, only isolation exercises without limiting synergists are appropriate for myoreps. If you’d like to be super precise in counting sets for your volume landmarks, we recommend counting myorep sets each as the equivalent of a straight set. While they do have fewer reps, they are often taken closer to failure and thus turn out to be about as fatiguing.
Without putting too fine a point on it, myoreps are pretty much THE WAY to train forearms. This happens nearly automatically, because when the forearms have locally recovered to be able to do at least 5 reps on the next set, all 3 of the other recovery constraints are either long-recovered or were never even taxed in the first place. Forearms seem to be composed of slightly more slower and intermediate-twitch fibers on average than most muscles, but, they get so much training for those by simply gripping for the other muscle groups, especially rear and side delts and the back. Thus, forearms probably need more fast-fiber direct training, much over 10 rep per set after the first set might not be the best idea anyway, so myoreps are nearly perfectly suited. The side effect great news on this: forearm training usually just doesn’t take that long! It does bear mention that the forearms don’t get as good of a pump from very low reps, so keeping myorep sets closer to 10 reps per set might work best for many.
Drop Sets
Drop sets are exactly like myoreps, but with even shorter rest times because weight is reduced by 10-20% on average between each set. The effects are very similar. The advantage of drop sets is their time saving, and their slight disadvantage over myoreps is that dropping the weight a lot can reduce mind-muscle connection via reducing tension perception. If you’d like to be super precise in counting sets for your volume landmarks, we recommend counting drop sets each as the equivalent of a straight set. While they do have fewer reps and lighter loads, they are often taken closer to failure and in such rapid and painful succession that they turn out to be about as fatiguing.
Because the forearms recover so quickly between sets anyway, a drop in load is often unnecessary. Also, it’s very hard to practically reduce the load on forearm training rapidly enough to pull off drop sets, unless you want to cannibalize all of your gym’s dumbbells!
Pre-Exhaust Supersets
These supersets begin with an isolation exercise for a given muscle group, and with no rest after taking it to 0-2 RIR, end with a compound exercise to which the target muscle is a big contributor. The local pre-exhaust of the isolation exercise allows the target muscle to be by far the limiting factor for the compound exercise that follows, and lets it be exposed to a few more effective reps than it otherwise would be if that compound was done fresh. After each 2-exercise superset, 4-factor rest is again taken until the next 2-exercise superset begins. If you’d like to be super precise in counting sets for your volume landmarks, we recommend counting pre-exhaust supersets as 1.5x as the equivalent of a straight set. This is because the compound exercise done in the second part of the set is only limited (highly) by the target pre-exhausted muscle, and this isn’t nearly as fatiguing, especially systemically, as it would be if it were done fresh.
Because the forearms don’t have any real compound movements and are so easy to target with isolations anyway, there isn’t much of a need for pre-exhaust in forearm training. However, it can be done, especially by doing forearm curls before transitioning into a static barbell or dumbbell hold. It HURTS, but it probably works!
Occlusion Sets
Occlusion training is myorep training with the limb occluded just above the muscle. This occlusion causes the local muscle and nerve to be far and away the limiting factors on recovery between sets, and thus allows you to focus in on a target muscle group that might have otherwise been difficult to reach with non-occluded movements. The big benefit is time saving, because rest between occluded sets is only long enough to get another 5 reps, and you can also use weights at the very low end of the growth range and even a bit lower (20-30% 1RM). The downside is that the local vasculature adapts very quickly to occlusion, so it might not be very effective for any more than a mesocycle or two in a row. Also, some muscles are much harder than others to occlude, or even impossible to occlude. If you’d like to be super precise in counting sets for your volume landmarks, we recommend counting occlusion sets each as the equivalent of 2/3 of a straight set, as they cause much less systemic fatigue due to the lower reps and weights used.
If occlusion was perfectly designed for any muscle, it would be the calves, and next up, the forearms. Just be ready for serious pain and push yourself very close to failure. Also, be ready to safely drop the dumbbells or barbell you’re using, because occlusion training can sneak failure up on you!
Source: renaissanceperiodization.com / Dr. Mike Israetel, Co-founder and Chief Sport Scientist