How to Increase Your Grip Strength: Part II

Recently, I wrote about why grip strength and proper development of your finger, hand, wrist, and forearm musculature is so important—whether you’re an athlete in just about any sport on the face of the planet or you’re simply spending your time doing things like typing, driving, housework, cooking, or anything else that requires your hands.

I’m going to give you insight from a man who I consider to be a true guru of grip: my fitness and obstacle course racing coach Yancy Culp. Here’s what Yancy had to say:

I grew up on a farm where I was required to work with my hands literally seven days a week, performing various tasks from hauling hay to chopping wood to building fences to working livestock and a variety of other farm duties. When I began competing in obstacle course racing (affectionately known as “OCR”), I quickly realized that these many years of working with my hands played a key role in my ability to complete the various upper body obstacles. (note from Ben: Yancy was actually one of the few athletes during the entire racing year to be able to complete every single obstacle with zero failures).

The moment I left the farm, I stayed active in various sports such as powerlifting and weightlifting and football—sports that required me to continue using my grip, so I rolled right in to the world of obstacle course racing without every going through a period of time where I allowed my grip strength to significantly decline. Once I began to hit obstacle course races, I realized that the same grip strength and grip endurance that helps you prevent nagging elbow and wrist injuries and helps you with activities of daily living and helps you maintain overall body strength, can also help you with rope climbs, monkey bars, rigs containing numerous types of hand holds you must traverse such as balls, pipes, ropes and rings, Herculean hoists, sandbag and bucket carries, Tarzan swings, sideways wall traverse, upside down rope traverse, cargo nets, walls, and a huge variety of other obstacles.

But even if you didn’t grow up on a farm, or have never done much weightlifting or powerlifting, or you have never trained your grip strength and currently feel as if you have terrible grip strength (and struggle with every upper body obstacle on an obstacle race course), you can still develop epic grip strength faster than you’d think.

The Best Grip Strengthening Exercises

Let’s first start with some methods of developing grip strength, and then I’ll provide you with a few methods and activities and sports you may not have considered.

1) Do a farmer’s carry (also known as a farmer’s walk) using as many different type of weighted objects as possible, including sandbags, kettle bells, dumbbells, barbells, milk jugs, cinderblocks, tires, and just about anything else you can get your hands on. What’s a farmer’s carry? You guessed it: just pick up the weights and start walking for as long as you can. When you get tired, set the weight down, shake out your hands for a few seconds, then pick up the weights and start walking again. You can go up hills, down hills, upstairs, downstairs, around your backyard, stepping up and down off benches, you name it.

2) Do pull-ups using various grip positions from a front, overhand grip to a neutral, sideways grip to a reverse, underhanded grip. On the same type of objects that you do pull ups from, you can also do static hanging using various grip positions. So, for example, you can do three pull-ups, and then simply do a static hang, which means you simply hang for as long as you can until your grip gives out. Do this over and over again as a set worked into one of your workouts. If you’d like, you can do things like cardio and core work in between your pull-ups and your hangs. And here’s a quick tip: the thicker the bar, the better training for your grip. If the bar is too thin, just wrap a towel around it and do your pull-ups or your hangs from the towel instead of the bar. Once you’ve conquered the pull-up, grab a weight and put it between your feet, put on a weighted vest, or wear a weighted belt and being to do resistance hangs and resistance pull-ups.

3) Pick heavy stuff up—specifically by using deadlifts and deadlift varieties. Using a variety of handgrips and a variety of bar shapes (again, the thicker the bar, the better) and a variety of objects, simply practice picking a heavy weight up and off the ground over and over again. Shock your body by using low reps and high weight on some days, and high rep with low weight on other days. If you don’t have a barbell to do your deadlifts, you can do deadlifts with a sandbag, a couple of kettle bells, dumbbells, heavy rocks, logs, you name it.

4) Use handgrip strengthening devices. One of the best handgrip strengthening devices out there is made by a company called “Captains Of Crush,” and comes in a variety of levels from easy all the way up to several hundred pounds of resistance. The same company also has little elastic bands for your fingers called “Hand Expanders.” When you combine regular use of a handgrip strengthening device with these elastic bands for your fingers, it’s not only a perfect way to train grip, but also an extremely effective way to get rid of issues such as tennis elbow and golfer’s elbow (pain on the outside or pain on the inside of your elbow).

5) Hit the playground. On a playground, play around with as many different methods of traversing the monkey bars as possible: sideways, front-to-back, back-to-front, one arm on a bar at a time, both arms on a bar at a time, etc. Throw in other moves on the playground equipment if other equipment is around, like climbing up the swingset chains, shimmying up poles, hanging upside down and doing pull-ups from the jungle gym, and even bouldering back and forth on kid’s rock climbing walls. You can easily spend an entire workout at a playground, and throw in sprints, skips, bounds, hops, burpees, and other moves in between your playground time.

In addition to the tips above, when working with Ben and my other clients, I also implement a few of my lesser-known grip-strengthening methods that allow you to have fun at the same time you’re getting a better grip, including Jiu Jitsu, Judo, other martial arts, wrestling, climbing trees, working with hand tools such as shovels, hoes, rakes (pretty much anything and everything associated with landscaping and gardening), cutting and chopping wood, swinging sledgehammers against giant tires, hauling hay, water skiing, wakeboarding and other water sports where you have to hold a ski rope. Other activities qualify too, such as playing a guitar for long periods of time, walking through airports carrying your luggage in your hands rather than rolling it on wheels or slinging it over your shoulders, and yes, even the macho activity of kneading bread.

Grip Strengthening Video

So as you can see, there are a huge variety of ways to train your grip. However, I’m often asked what my “bread-and-butter” grip training exercises are. So, in no particular order of importance, here are seven of my favorites.

1. Sandbell rows

2. Sandbell snatch & throw

3. Sledgehammer swings

4. Tire flip

5. Horizontal and vertical pull-ups and hang

6. Farmer’s walk

7. Hand grip strengthening device

Click here for a video where I demonstrate all these moves.  

When I incorporate these strategies with Ben and my other clients, I work grip strength training into the training program a minimum of three times a week, sometimes as part of a bigger workout and sometimes on its own as part of a “mini-workout.” For an OCR athlete, a huge key is to include as much variety in a single workout as possible because in many cases you’ll have to deal with two, three, four or five grip strength obstacles within a very short distance out on course (in a Spartan race, a series of obstacles like this all lined up in a row tend to be called a “Burpee-maker,” due to the high rate of grip failure).

Performing higher rep count sets in which you get to a forearm and grip burning feeling in which lactic acid is building up in your arms, then resting, and repeating while using many different types of devices as possible can go a long way in helping you out on a course, and in building grip endurance.

A Sample Grip Strengthening Workout

Here’s what a very basic and easy-to-implement sample workout I’d program for Ben would look like:

Run for two minutes at race pace

Do sandbag farmer’s carry for thirty seconds

Do ten pull-ups, then hang until forced to drop

Continue repeating for ten rounds but drop pull-ups down to 9/8/7/6/5/4/3/2/1 for remaining nine sets. 

The reasoning behind training like this is it’s easy for many to step up to a pull-up bar and knock out pull-ups when they are fresh, but hitting that bar with a high heart rate and after hammering the grip with the farmer’s walk is a whole different story.  Completing workouts like this will start to build a lot of confidence as you approach obstacles out on course, and even if you never plan on doing an obstacle course race, developing a strong grip will help you reduce risk of elbow and wrist injuries, increase overall body strength, and reduce your propensity for shoulder injury.

Oh, and one final thing: try not to wear gloves. Rather than relying on the tacky grip of a glove, it’s better to build up callouses and tough skin on your hands and fingers. Plus, if you are indeed an obstacle racer and your gloves get wet or muddy, you’re going to find that you slide off obstacles quite quickly. In other words: ugly, beat-up hands with big old muscular sausage fingers make for a great grip.

Summary

A big thanks to coach Yancy for these tips!

There are a couple extra quick take-aways I want to throw in before bringing this article to a close. In a recent podcast I recorded with an award-winning author about avoiding elbow and wrist pain by dictating rather than typing on a computer, I mention two other strategies—strategies that you should highly consider implementing if you type a lot, have wrist or elbow pain from any other activity, or if you’re doing plenty of the type of grip strengthening exercises you’ve just learned.

1) Get Yourself An “Arm Aid” Device. This is a device that looks like some kind of a medieval torture device but that actually works better than anything I have found for deep tissue work on your wrists, forearms and elbows. Here’s a video of me demonstrating what it looks like and how to use it.

2) Try The “Elbow Cure” Program. At first glance this website appears to be selling a cheesy, internet marketing slang-filled e-book, but it’s actually one of the most innovative programs I’ve ever used for eliminating my own elbow pain fast. It involves things like a hammer, rubber bands, big wooden sticks, and other easy-to-find tools for banishing elbow pain. It’s a very simple, easy-to-follow program.

So that’s it. Do you have more questions about how to increase grip strength how to eliminate elbow pain or anything else that you’ve learned? Join the conversation at Facebook.com/getfitguy.