The simulation of thick 3D composite reinforcement forming brings to light new modeling challenges. The specific anisotropic material behavior due to the possible slippage between fibers induces, among other phenomena, the development of spurious transverse modes in bending-dominated 3D simulations. To obtain coherent finite element responses, two solutions are proposed. The first one uses a simple assumed strain formulation usually prescribed to prevent volumetric locking. This solution avoids spurious transverse modes by stiffening of the hourglass modes. Nevertheless the deformation obtained by this approach still suffers from the inability of the standard continuum mechanics of Cauchy to describe fibrous material deformation. The second proposed approach is based on the introduction of a bending stiffness which both avoids the spurious transverse modes and also improves the global behavior of the element formulation by enriching the underlying continuum. To emphasize the differences between different formulations, element stiffnesses are explicitly calculated and compared.