Get a Grip

Want to be able to hit a home run? How about rock climb like a pro? What about changing the bottle on the water fountain at the office? Perhaps, like most people whom strength train, you want to deadlift enough weight to shake the building when you put the weight down. All of these activities have one thing in common; to excel at it a person’s grip strength needs to outstanding. Limp-wristed, weak, floppy hand shaking is not going to cut it. From every day activities to peak performance in athletics, success goes those with the strongest grips. When most people think of grip in relation to exercise, they think of hand positioning and grip width. It is rare that the average gym goer thinks of grip strength as a limiting factor in success in strength training.

Alternating hand position and grip width is an excellent way of creating minor variations in a given exercise to create a slightly different stimulation to the muscles during training. There are five different grips that can be used to hold barbells, dumb bells, kettle bells, or machines. The pronated grip has the palms down and knuckles up. The supinated grip is the opposite with the knuckles down and the palms up. Sometimes these grips are referred to as overhand and underhand, respectively.  A neutral grip has the knuckles running vertical to the ground, like during a hand shake. An alternated grip has one hand that is pronated and one that is supinated. Finally, there is the hook grip which is similar to the pronated grip. However, with the hook grip the thumbs are resting on the bar underneath of the fingers instead of wrapping around the bar. Grip width is determined by the placement of the hands on the bar in relation to the shoulders. A common grip is at or slightly wider than shoulder-width; narrow is narrower than the shoulders; wide is wider. Five different grips in three different positions; it is possible to create up to 125 different variations of a given exercise just by changing the grip. Feel like the effectiveness of an exercise has worn off? Try the same exercise with a different grip.

Now, how to improve that grip strength to go from floppy dead fish handshake to bone-crushing vice grips? After all, male or female, no one likes shaking hands with limp fish. To be clear, there is a 

difference in training for an increase in the size of the forearms and an increase in grip strength. The few people who actually make a focused effort to train their forearms probably use a variation of wrist curls. While wrist curls are an excellent way to improve forearm size and strength, they completely miss three other aspects of grip strength. The three other types of grip strength are passive crushing, active crushing, and pinch gripping. Pay attention, we are talking about crushing stuff. Grip strengthening just got more interesting didn’t it?

Passive crushing is when the grip is challenged to hold on to an object that is too heavy; the muscles must tense around the object to keep it from slipping out of grasp. This happens when a person struggles against gravity to avoid dropping a dumb bell or barbell because the strength in the hands

holding on to it is beginning to fade. An excellent way to train this is to make the object thicker. Use an implement like fat gripz on dumb bells or barbells. If your gym does not have any wrap a towel around the bar or cut some small pieces of foam pipe insulation to wrap around the handles.

Active crushing involves squeezing on to an object in an attempt to make it move, this is where those infamous hand pincers come into play. It sounds corny but it is one of the best ways to strengthen the grip. The key here is not to perform this for reps but from time under tension, or, duration. Hold the grip against the resistance for as long as possible.

Time under Tension with Hand Pincer

The final aspect of grip strength is pinch gripping. Passive and active crushing trains the muscles in the palm of the hand and forearm while pinch gripping shifts the focus into the strength of the fingers and thumb. Pinch gripping is performed by grabbing on to an object using only the finger and thumbs and squeezing it. As with passive gripping, the wider the object is, the harder this will be. Like active crushing, pinch gripping is also trained by duration or time under tension.

No one likes a weak handshake. I do not like missing deadlift PRs because my hands cannot hold the weight. The solution to both of these problems is to develop bone crushing grip strength. Popeye would be proud.