Bodybuilding the a sport in which we work to develop the muscles of our body, along with the removal of body fat, to present the most massive, muscular, and symmetrical package possible. We lift weights to add mass. We use a lot of sets and repetitions to add the muscularity. And we adjust our caloric intake through dieting practices to reduce body fat. These goals reflect directly upon the muscle groups and body fat percent visible on our bodies, but they don’t always take into consideration the joints of the body, which cannot grow like muscle nor shrink like fat. They just have to try to withstand the pounding we give them in the weight room and hope they don’t fail on us. One area where the joints seem to take an incredible pounding at time ...

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Q: I get an unusual kind of soreness and I don’t know how to avoid it. It’s happened for years, but now that I’m going heavier in all movements, it’s getting too painful to keep training on a regular schedule throughout the week. The day after doing legs, I have an incapacitating soreness in my forearms. How can I stop this? A: This is actually more common than you think, and it’s usually to do with how you hold your hands during work in a bar-related movement. Squats, but especially deadlifts, are the most problematic for this. You may also hold a ton of stress in your wrists and hands, anticipating increasing weight in your workouts. Using straps and incapacitating wrists and hands during exercise is also to blame for this. A couple of things can help, other than ...

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The forearms, or the hand grip more specifically, are often the most likely single point of failure on back exercises. Many bodybuilders find themselves reaching the point of failure on exercises like barbell rows, chin-ups, and deadlifts not because the back muscles are exhausted, but because their hands are no longer able to hold onto the bar or barbell. After all, the back is a large and complex network of muscles, while the hands and forearms are much smaller. Some bodybuilders will use wrist straps to affix the bar to their bodies. This allows the hands to act more as hooks, and lets the bodybuilder to continue training the back muscles even past a point where the hands would have failed to be able to hold on any longer. This is akin to using a spotter on other ...

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