Lifting Straps Vs. Forearm Gains

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This Week’s Healthy Discussion

1. Lifting Straps Vs. Forearm Gains

2. Full Stretch

3. My Favourite Forearm Exercise

Lifting Straps vs. Forearm Gains

Something that constantly comes up on social media is people arguing whether or not you should be using lifting straps.

Some will argue that you should be letting your grip strength increase and just train with what you can hold.

Then you have the opposite, who state that lifting straps are the secret to training your back to failure.

When training for strength, I do see a reason why avoiding them can be useful as you want to be as strong as possible in every body part.

However, when training for muscle growth, lifting straps can and will be the secret to growth in your back and hamstrings.

We want our back to be the muscle that is failing, not our grip, so using lifting straps are the secret to fixing that problem.

You should include some forearm exercises, because building a balanced physique is definitely ideal, so throw in some wrist curls and reverse curls to solve that problem.

Full Stretch

With upper back training, one of the main things I see done wrong is cutting the range of motion short.

The best thing you can do for your upper back growth is let your scapula fully protract. This is where a lot of the growth will be in the movement.

You may need to lower the weight the first time you try this because typically this makes the movement much harder.

However, once you make the switch, I guarantee you will see much more growth in your upper back.

My Favourite Forearm Exercise

With all the forearm talk, this is by far my favourite exercise as of late:

Seated Wrist Curl - All you need is a bench and straight bar. Sit at the end of the bench and have the bar rest underneath your thighs and perform a typical wrist curl.