Reverse Wrist Curl

The reverse wrist curl is an isolation exercise for the forearm extensors, the muscles on the top of the forearm that most training programmes never touch directly. With your forearm resting on a bench and your palm facing down, you lift the dumbbell by extending the wrist, then lower it until the wrist flexes fully. It is the mirror image of the standard wrist curl, and it matters more than its size suggests: the extensors stabilise the wrist under every pressing and pulling movement, and they are the muscles involved in tennis elbow, which makes strengthening them a genuinely useful piece of injury prevention. The loads here are small by design. The extensors are far weaker than the flexors, so a dumbbell that looks trivial will produce a full, honest contraction through a controlled range.