The Art of Manliness blog has had several posts about Bruce Lee. Most recently, there was one on Bruce Lee's fore arm workouts. Those fore arms didn't come about from simply punching Wing Chun dummies.
An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.
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.
A Dragon’s Forearms
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.”
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:
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Bruce Lee performed a dedicated forearm workout every day. Here’s an example of one of his typical routines:
- Underhand Wrist Curl: 4 sets x 17 reps
- Overhand Wrist Curl: 4 x 12
- Leverage Bar Curl: 4 x 12
- Reverse Leverage Bar Curl: 4 x 12
- Reverse Curl: 4 x 6
- Wrist-Roller: 4 complete windings
- Leverage Bar Twist: 3 x 10
In addition to doing his daily dedicated forearm workout, Lee also did forearm exercises at random times throughout his day, whether he was at home or on a movie set. According to his wife Linda, he did Zottman curls whenever he had a spare moment, often performing them with one arm while he read a book with the other.
He also used a gripping machine he had designed and kept in his office and cranked out reps on it when he had moments of downtime in between tasks and squeezed his sponge gripper as he went about his daily routine. You can replicate these exercises by keeping a gripper (I like these from Captains of Crush) in your desk drawer and squeezing out a few reps whenever you have a chance.
With a little dragon-like passion and a dose of Lee’s dedication, you’ll be filling out your shirt sleeves in no time.
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