Forearm Exercises with Dumbbells

If you don’t have a wrist roller setup at your home, I’ll show you a couple of great forearm exercises with dumbbells you should be doing if you are looking to strengthen your wrist, fingers and forearm. In my opinion, these work much better than the wrist curl which is the only wrist exercise known my many gym rats.

Hopefully you already have a really small dumbbells, because you just won’t be able to do this exercise properly with heavier weights. This is something you may even want a 5 lb. or 10 lb. dumbbell for.

For the first exercise, grab your dumbbell by one of the heads and just spin it around by rotating your wrist. This simple dumbbell workout called “circling a dumbbell”, which was actually one of the favorite exercises of many old time strongmen, like Edward Aston (you’ll also find some other forearm exercises on this page), will work your fingers and wrist because of the leverage.

Go ahead and try wrist curls in that same position and you’ll see it’s much tougher because of the leverage effect. It’s even harder when you do a reverse style and that’s why you want to avoid heavy dumbbells.

Strong forearms are essential for the would-be strongman. You think Arthur Saxon could put 370 lbs. overhead if his forearms were weak?