Grip Strength: Why it is really important

Grip strength is one of the most overlooked aspects of training by many; perhaps the most. The problem is that we have plenty of research that illustrates it’s important for every single person. The lack of grip training most likely comes from the fact that it’s not exactly as sexy or exciting as growing some biceps or that 6-pack. Still, we at prepare for performance know the difference it can make in your life and want to make sure our clients have this information.

1) It Will Increase The Quality Of Your Other Lifting Performance

Grip strength is often the limiting factor for many lifters when performing certain movements with the barbell or dumbbells. This can significantly affect your progress as the muscles you are trying to grow never receive a proper stimulus to cause fatigue as your grip fails too quickly. Sure, you can use straps, but then you’ll never increase your grip… it’s a catch-22. Spend time to increase your grip strength so that you will be able to lift more.

2) Grip Strength Is An Indicator Of Overall Muscle Mass And Strength

As you could probably guess, grip strength and the thickness of associated muscles have been found to be a reliable indicator for the health and strength of the person’s muscular system. While this makes sense for the upper body, what’s interesting is that handgrip strength is an indicator for the whole body, including the lower body. Handgrip strength has a strong correlation with muscle power of the lower body, knee extension, and the cross-sectional areas of the calf in older populations. Even more interesting is that the handgrip strength of patients can indicate how well they can recover from rehabilitation involving breaks and fractures.

The bottom line is that your grip strength indicates the health and strength of your muscles.

3) Grip Strength Is An Indicator Of Your Overall Health And Risk Of Mortality

Grip strength is one of the best indicators for overall health, risk of mortality, and risk of chronic disease. In fact, this is no secret within the world of health and exercise physiology as there have been perhaps hundreds of studies that have come to this conclusion. Here is a small list of studies to illustrate this:

• Grip strength is a long-term predictor of mortality from all causes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer in men

• Grip strength is an indicator of nutritional health, short and long-term mortality, morbidity, and ability to recover from surgeries/hospital stays.

• Grip strength is associated with cardiopulmonary function

The exact mechanisms aren’t known, but it is believed that grip strength illustrates the health of the muscle system and the neuromuscular function. This obviously begs the question, “Is its the actual grip strength that improves health, or is it the lifestyle that leads to a strong grip that improves health?” It’s most likely the latter. However, another theory to some of the benefits is that the specific grip training that creates a stronger grip creates more muscle mass and higher neuromuscular efficiency.

Regardless, the correlation between grip strength and overall health is too strong to ignore.

The Top Grip Exercises

So now you know you need to train your grip, let us show you how. As mentioned, grip training can be boring, and no one wants to sit around and use those grip strengthening squeeze tools all day (They do work though!). Here are the best exercises to train your grip that are a bit more exciting

1) Farmer Carries

Farmer carries are a great exercise regardless and you should definitely be doing them. However, they will also increase your grip fast as this is the limiting factor. All you do is pick up two implements and walk with them. Ideally, this is with specific farmer carry bars, but you can also use a trap bar, heavy kettlebells, or heavy dumbbells.

The great thing about this is you are going to also get an excellent total body workout and work on your

Farmers Carry

 conditioning as well

2) Use A Rope Or Towel For Certain Exercises

Some exercises can be done by using a towel or rope attachment to hold on to. For example, throw a towel over a bar and do towel pull-ups. You should be able to do a similar set-up for quite a few other pulling exercises. Some examples are:

• Seated rows: Use the rope attachment

• Hammer Curls: Use the rope attachment

• Landmine Rows: Throw a towel around the bar

You can even combine this with farmer carries. Wrap a towel around a dumbbell or kettlebell and walk. Just remember that if you use a rope attachment, don’t let your hands be supported by the ball at the end. Be sure to only grip the rope.

3) Fat Grip Training

You will either need to buy a special piece of equipment for this (called Fat Grip), or you can use a towel. The Fat Gripz are just molded pieces of rubber that can be fitted to wrap around a barbell or dumbbell. Or you can wrap a towel around a barbell. Either way, what effectively happens is that you increase the barbell’s width, which requires more grip strength. This is also very easy to incorporate into your training program that already exists. A common practice is to use fat grip for warm-up sets on exercises such as deadlifts or Romanian deadlifts.

4) Heavy Dumbbell Rows/Kroc Rows

Exactly how it sounds. Use heavy dumbbells for your dumbbell rows and do a version called Kroc rows. These are dumbbell rows that are done with heavy dumbbells and allow somebody movement to move the dumbbell. Since you are using your body, your grip is the limiting factor.

5) Stop Using Strap For Everything

Not so much a specific exercise rather than advice.Way too many people use straps in the gym who no business doing so.While there’s no exact number, if you can’t deadlift at least 1.5X your body weight with no straps you should keep them at home.Straps are supposed to help move heavy weight, not be a crutch for a weak grip.

There are plenty of other grip training exercises, but these are the most practical and enjoyable. It doesn’t matter what method you choose or if you use all of them. What’s important is that you start specific grip training today!

Do you want to work on your grip strength? Build an overall stronger body? Sign up for a one-week trial for our small group team training classes.