Bruce Lee’s Forearm Workout

If we’ve learned one thing this year about what the ladies find attractive in men, it’s forearms: forearms sticking out of rolled-up sleeves; forearms gripping steering wheels; forearms handling tools. Women love the look of a man’s well-developed forearms.

Strong forearms are functional too: they improve your throwing capacity and help you lift, carry, and hold things better.

If you’ve wanted to build bigger, stronger, more defined forearms, today we’ll get a tutorial on how to do so from someone who raised forearm development to an art: Bruce Lee.

Dragon’s Forearms

Last month, we detailed the all-around physical training protocols Bruce Lee used to build his strong and chiseled physique.

But there wasn’t room in that article for delving into how Lee worked his forearms, an area of his body he was especially committed to developing. Lee believed that forearm strength was essential to punching power and grip strength, capacities that were fundamental to his life’s great goal: becoming the best martial artist in the world. And, as someone who desired to fully express the beauty of his body, he appreciated the aesthetics of muscular forearms as well.

Lee’s wife Linda called him “a forearm fanatic.” The martial artist Bob Wall remembered: “Bruce had the biggest forearms proportionate to anybody’s body that I’ve ever seen. I mean, his forearms were huge! He had incredibly powerful wrists and fingers—his arms were just extraordinary.” Another friend said that “If you ever grabbed hold of Bruce’s forearm, it was like grabbing hold of a baseball bat.”

Bruce Lee’s Forearm Exercises

The forearms include numerous muscles that can be broadly categorized into two groups: the flexors (on the underside of the forearm) and the extensors (on the top of the forearm).

To develop truly meaty forearms, you’ve got to do exercises that work both of these groups of muscles. As you do so, your forearms will not only develop in size, definition, and strength, but you’ll improve the stability, endurance, and stamina of your wrists and grip as well.

Lee only lifted weights three times a week, but he trained his forearms every single day, doing a variety of exercises that trained all of their muscles.

While Lee commissioned the creation of several special forearm-training apparatuses, most of the exercises he did, which we’ll detail below, can replicated by the average joe:

Wrist Roller. Lee was a big fan of this classic forearm exercise, which targets both the extensors and the flexors of the forearms. To perform it, you need a wrist-roller device: a bar/rod from which a rope hangs that attaches to a light weight (usually 5-10 pounds).

To perform the wrist-roll exercise, stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and hold the wrist-roller rod straight out in front of you with both hands, palms facing down. Begin rolling the weight up by rotating your wrists; focus on using your wrists to roll the rope around the bar, rather than moving your arms or shoulders. Don’t bend your elbows. Continue rolling until the weight reaches the top, near the bar.

Slowly lower the weight in a controlled way by reversing the motion.

Lee could perform push-ups with just two fingers (the index and thumb), of one hand.

Fingertip push-ups. Fingertip push-ups are performed as you would traditional push-ups, but instead of placing the entirety of