Exercise library

How to do the Finger Curls

A beginner isolation exercise using barbell, working the forearms.

Primary musclesForearms
Secondary musclesNone recorded
EquipmentBarbell
LevelBeginner
TypeIsolation
ForcePull

Steps

  1. Hold a barbell with both hands and your palms facing up; hands spaced about shoulder width.
  2. Place your feet flat on the floor, at a distance that is slightly wider than shoulder width apart. This will be your starting position.
  3. Lower the bar as far as possible by extending the fingers. Allowing the bar to roll down the hands, catch the bar with the final joint in the fingers.
  4. Now curl bar up as high as possible by closing your hands while exhaling. Hold the contraction at the top.

Tracking it in OneRep

Add the finger curls to a routine and your previous weight and reps sit beside every set, so the decision to add load is made by what is already on the screen rather than by memory. Exercise history and volume trends are one tap away, and logging works offline for the gyms where signal does not reach.

Because OneRep tracks food on the same timeline, a stall on this lift can be read against what you were actually eating that month — which is the difference between a programming problem and an eating one. More on that in tracking progressive overload without a spreadsheet.

Where the instructions come from

The steps above come from free-exercise-db, a public-domain exercise dataset. They are general guidance, not coaching for your body: if a movement hurts, stop and get someone qualified to look at it.