The old lifting adage is that if you can’t hold onto it, you can’t lift it. This is pretty obvious, and it doesn’t really give you any new information to work with. If it’s supposed to be a motivator to train grip strength, it doesn’t seem to be working.

Let me tell you what IS a motivation to train your grip: being able to pick up something that others can’t even budge off the ground because their fingers slip right off it. Success breeds success, and that kind of thing breeds an awfully strong desire for more success. Like this:

That lift alone was enough motivation for another year of grip training. Most people will never even budge an Inch dumbbell off the floor.

What is Open Hand Strength?

Open-hand grip training is the kind of grip training that allows you to pick up large, awkward objects without convenient handles. These are things that are big enough that they prevent you from wrapping your thumb around your fingers as in a traditional barbell lift or lifting something with a thin handle. Hence, open hand. Common lifting objects to test and train this type of grip strength include:

York blobs, which are heads of old York dumbbells that have been cut off. Lifting a York 50 is considered an elite level of grip strength:

Fat handled dumbbells, such as the famous Thomas Inch dumbbell, or modern circus bells like the Sorinex Bosco Bell.

Axles are incredibly popular in strongman competition, as well as forming a cornerstone of the grip sport trio of lifts.

The Rolling Thunder rotating handle from Iron Mind is another staple in the grip athlete’s arsenal.

Train It

You want to train your hands to pick up large objects. Good.

First thing’s first, if you’re willing to spend a little money than you need to get yourself some Fat Gripz. I feel like a broken record because I write about them so often. Here’s the thing, though: Prior to the invention of these cheap and handy silicone sleeves, you had to spend at least several hundred dollars on hard-to-find equipment. Now, for about forty bucks, you can turn anything into a fat-handled object.

Simplest thing to do? Put Fat Gripz on everything you do for 8 weeks. Pull-ups, deadlifts, rows, and presses. The works. You will see you hand strength go through the roof.

Next simplest hand-strengthener: Meander over to the dumbbell rack. Stand a dumbbell on its end on the ground. Grab it from the top with your fingers and thumb. Try to pick it up. Adjust the weight accordingly.

One of my favorite things to do with any grip lift is a 2-minute deadlift challenge. See how many times you can pick it up off the ground in two minutes. You can either stick to one hand at a time, or use both.

The big picture for training open-hand strength is to start with something that you can’t wrap your hand all the way around, and pick it up. If it’s too hard, make it a little bit lighter or easier. If it’s too easy, make it a bit more challenging.

Ready for a Challenge?

I don’t know where it originated, but a couple years ago my friends Adam T. Glass and Matt Brouse started doing this fat dumbbell challenge as a way to progress towards the Inch dumbbell. It’s a genius way to train because you get a very different training stimulus from each the three movements. Here’s what you do:

Load a fat dumbell handle (or Fat Gripz on a regular dumbbell handle) with an amount of weight that you can one-arm snatch. Work up to your max snatch that way.

Now add more weight, working up to a clean max.

Finally, continue adding weight until you work up to a deadlift max.

You can also train this in reverse, but the idea remains the same.

I haven’t tried this particular challenge in a while, so I’ll post my score later this week. Give it a shot, and post your numbers in the comments.

Continuing my in grip training series about how to be more like Jared Allen this week I want to address the bastard child of grip training that I despise: pinching. Pinch training is so important to hand strength and health and is equally neglected by standard gym practices and most people – even those who think they train their grip.

Pinch gripping involves using the forceps power of the thumb and fingers together. The range of things you can pinch range from small and thin objects like a thin piece of steel with a hole punched in it to hang weight from to the wide berth of two 45 pound standard plates sandwiched together.  In general, there is a width sweet spot where your pinch (depending on hand size and other anthropometry) is the strongest and on both sides of that sweet spot you can pinch a bit less.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so try this:

If that isn’t convincing enough, here are the two most important reasons you should be doing at least a little bit of pinch work on a weekly basis:

First, in the same way that standard one-inch barbells and dumbbells don’t adequately stress the strength of the thumb, no typical gym movements adequately train this important function of the hand.  You simply can’t develop complete hand strength without working on pinch strength. No matter how good you may be at closing difficult grippers, holding on to heavy barbells, or strong with fat handled implements none of those things will carry over to the forceps power of the thumb and extended fingers.

The second reason is fairly counterintuitive. Training opposition movements is vital to maintaining health and function. For example, a smart trainer or trainee balances their pushing and pulling movements even going to far as to doing more pulling if their life movements consist of pushing movements or positions. With most grip training consisting of closing the hand against resistance, it stands to reason that the functional opposite would be opening the hand against resistance. This has led to the popularity of extending the fingers against rubber bands. The problem is – it doesn’t work. On the other hand, training the stabilization function of the fingers in a static and extended role does seem to maintain hand health and function. I first learned this from grip freak show Adam T. Glass and have since put it into practice. I owe the following useful analogy to him as well, that helps to understand why that may be:

An alligator has tremendously powerful jaws, able to clamp down with enough force to tear flesh and break bones. But, if a handler can wrap his hands around the closed mouth, the alligator is unable to open it. His jaw, much like the muscles of the hand, simply are not designed to open against resistance – rather they’re intended to close forcefully against it.

This is one of those counterintuitive practices that may not seem logical and can only be learned through experience and trial and error.

Training Your Pinchers

One of the very best ways to train pinch is with an adjustable pinch apparatus. This device, also known as a “euro pinch” allows you to easily adjust the width of the pinch surface, provides a uniform gripping surface for the hands, and is easily plate loaded. Up until recently the unfortunate answer for how or where to get one was “You can’t.” David Horne, a grip aficionado and legend based in the UK, produced and sold the devices but had stopped doing so. Serendipitously, Jedd Johnson has recently started selling the device.

The reality is most people aren’t interested in grip training enough to buy an expensive and special device for it. Fortunately, there are some really great simple products out there that will help you easily and cheaply train your grip.

The very easiest (and probably free) thing to do is to sandwich two weight plates together with the flat surfaces facing out. You can either hang weight from the holes, or just get a short piece of 2” pipe to put through the center and add weight to.

In this way, two 10s, two 25s, and two 45s give you different widths and weights to train with. A quick demo of that and a few other things you can use in this video:

Things to Try

Once you’ve got something difficult to hang on to, there are lots of things you can do with it:

• Deadlift it, obviously.
• Do pull-ups with it, if you’re strong enough.
• Row it.
• Attach it to something you can drag and drag it.
• Do swings with it.
• Farmer walk it.
• Hold on to it for time.
• Juggle it.
• Add more weight to it, and do it again.

 

 

In case you didn’t see it, a couple weeks ago Minnesota Viking Jared Allen performed one of the most impressive (and hilarious) tackles of a quarterback. Allen was busy tangling with an offensive lineman as Eli Manning was scrambling to get the pass off. Instead of going AROUND the lineman (Beatty), Allen just reached around him, grabbed the back of Manning’s jersey and held on. And held on. And held on. For at least four seconds until he got leveled by another Viking. You can see the whole clip here.

It was glorious. And a perfect excuse to talk about a subject I’ve wanted to right about for some time: training for grip strength.

That Crush Grip

For those who haven’t been indoctrinated into the world of grip training there is only “grip strength”, but really there are several different types of grip strength which don’t necessarily carry over to one another. The type of grip strength I’m going to cover today is crush grip, or the closed-hand crushing strength of the fingers. Other primary types of grip strength include pinch grip, support grip, open hand grip, and levering.

When people think of grip strength they think of crush grip. This is the type of grip Jared Allen was testing when he clamped his fingers down on Manning’s jersey. This is the type of grip involved in closing a gripper, and is the one people who have been training on barbells for years are the strongest at naturally. This type of grip strength, unfortunately, carries over poorly to the other types of hand strength. Yours truly happens to have an above-average crush grip (and so of course it’s my favorite type of grip to train) due to years of heavy deadlifting, but my pinch grip for example is abysmal.

One of the very best ways to train the crush grip is with a torsion spring gripper. These grippers, like the famous IronMind Captains of Crush series, are legitimate strength tools unlike the silly little plastic-handled grippers you can buy at any sporting goods store and do hundreds of repetitions with. Closing a difficult torsion spring gripper requires skill and strength.

Enter Adam T. Glass, a man whose hands are as immalleable as the iron that forged them. I am lucky to have learned everything I know about grip training from Adam having spent years training with him. It is a longstanding joke that if you hang around Adam long enough you will eventually get into grip training. I denied it for a long time that I was “into grip” but when I realized I had competed in more grip contests than any other type of contest I had to eventually concede that I was into grip training.

But I have digressed, so let’s get back to the topic at hand. The torsion spring gripper needs to be set properly in the hand to maximize the leverage to close it. Simply putting it in your hand and closing it is called a no set or a table no set grip. This is rarely used, especially in contest, partly because it depends greatly on the size of the hand. To properly close a gripper to a set standard (often a parallel set, or a 25mm set), you “set” it in the hand using your other hand to partially close it to a set width. I’ll let Adam explain how to do it:

When Adam says he is not an expert, he’s being modest. He’s on a very short list of certified Captains of Crush who have closed the CoC #3 under strict judging criteria.

If you want to get started with some grippers, I can strongly recommend my buddy (and neighbor!) Matt Cannon’s company Cannon Powerworks. Every company has a slightly different way of rating their gripper difficulty beyond the level number or name they assign it. For example, the IronMind CoC #1 is rated at 140lbs. Unfortunately, no one really knows how these ratings are determined and how they compare to one-another since every company differs. Plus, there is always variance from one gripper to another. Grip fanatics therefore developed the RGC, or Redneck Gripper Calibration, rating system to consistently measure them in the same fashion. Matt is an old hand at running his RGC rig, so he can measure your gripper before shipping it out to you for a few bucks extra. This is really critical if you’re serious about your grip training because you could have a significant difference between two of the exact same model gripper. It’s ends up being like thinking the bar is loaded to 130 when it’s really 150. I don’t get anything for recommending Matt and his site, I just would like to see him do well with his side business.

Just getting started? Get a gripper rated (via RGC, not manufacturer rankings) well below 100, and one right around 100. You will be able to progress the easier gripper until the ~100 one is easier. Then make the jump to something in the 120 range. I like the IronMind grippers, and the GHP are also very nice pieces of equipment. For about $50 you can make a significant impact on your grip strength.

Why Train Grip?

Grip training may actually be the highest payoff training you will ever do. If the benefits of being able to hold on to things is lost on you, I’m not sure there is much hope of convincing you. Glass was always fond of pointing out how it’s unlikely that you will ever have strong hands without a strong body, but there are lots of strong bodies without strong hands. Jared Allen could push and pull all the iron in the world, but if he couldn’t keep his hand closed on that jersey, that sack wouldn’t happen. If you can’t hang on to that bar, your deadlift isn’t going to happen no matter how strong your legs are.

In next week’s installment, I’ll cover my least favorite type of grip strength: pinch gripping.