How to Increase Your Grip Strength: Part I
What is grip strength and why is it important? Find out how you can increase your grip strength, and why people of all fitness levels need good grip strength.
Ben Greenfield
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How to Increase Your Grip Strength: Part I
Here’s a quick question: which of your muscles did you use the most over the past hour? The past day? The past week? If you’re like most people on the face of this planet, the answer is this: your fingers, hands, wrists, and forearms.
Just think about it: nearly every sport that exists, from swimming to wrestling to golf to tennis to football to basketball to baseball to climbing to obstacle course racing and beyond, require extremely high activity levels of the thirty-five tiny gripping muscles in your forearms and hand. But most common activities of daily living also rely upon adequate strength and endurance in these muscles, too, including typing, moving the trackpad or mouse on your computer, doing the dishes, carrying laundry, turning a doorknob, vacuuming, driving, and even sex (seriously, just try to get it on in the bedroom with your hands tied behind your back or your fingers clenched in fists the whole time).
Why Good Grip Is So Important
If your grip and form muscles are not conditioned with mobility, strength, and endurance, then the result winds up being the frustrating chronic repetitive motion injuries that plague both office workers and athletes alike. For example, without adequate grip and forearm strength, tennis players develop tennis elbow (lateral epicondylitis), which is debilitating and disabling pain on the outside of the elbow. Golfers, climbers, CrossFitters, and obstacle racers who don’t have adequate grip and forearm training often develop the opposite issue: a problem known as golfers elbow, climbers elbow, and medial epicondylitis, which is basically pain anywhere on the inside of the elbow and forearm. People who work on a computer often get one or both of these same issues. And you can undergo all the deep tissue work, injections, massage, and anti-inflammatory remedies on the face of the planet, but until you address the underlying issue of grip and forearm conditioning, these problems will continue to plague you.
It actually baffles me why many physical therapists, physicians, and chiropractors don’t more often prescribe grip strengthening strategies for recovery from issues such as tennis elbow or golfers elbow or even carpal tunnel syndrome. For me personally, the elbow pain that I’ve gotten from the combination of copious amounts of pull-ups and rope climbing, combined with ungodly amounts of time spent typing away on my Macbook Pro ,has only really been remedied with the type of grip exercises you’re going to get later on this article, and not via remedies such as injections or topical ointments or curcumin or ginger or anything else that would normally work for injuries on other parts of my body.
Fitness training legend Charles Poliquin backs this up when he says:
“These ailments are often caused by improper strength ratios between the elbow muscles and the forearm muscles. If the elbow flexors, like the biceps and brachialis, are too strong for the forearm flexors, uneven tension accumulates in the soft tissue and results in elbow pain.”
Heck, issues with your grip can even radiate out to other areas of your body and cause even more injuries that you’d never guess have to do with your grip. For example, the health of your shoulder and rotator cuff has been correlated to the strength of your grip. One study found that grip strength has a significant correlation with the muscle strength of shoulder abduction and external rotation, and another study has revealed increased prevalence of rotator cuff weakness and injury on the same side of a hand injury or disorder.
But grip strength goes above and beyond just injury prevention. For example, it’s been proven in multiple studies that grip strength is a fantastic predictor of overall body strength. In his book Science of Sports Training, sport scientist Thomas Kurz recommends the measurement of handgrip strength using something called a grip dynamometer (you can get one for home use here) to reveal the strength and physical readiness of an athlete. For example, if grip strength is fallen below baseline or before where it was before the previous day’s work out, it can actually be an indicator of fatigue or lack of optimal recovery.
Back to the wisdom of Charles Poliquin, who also says that:
“When your grip strength improves, less neural drive is needed for the forearm and hand muscles to perform other exercises. That is why many trainees report breaking training plateaus in a host of lifts, ranging from dead lifts to curls, after doing a grip specialization routine.”
In the Get-Fit Guy episode “How to Train like an American Ninja Warrior,” you learn why grip strength is paramount in an obstacle-style event, especially for obstacles in “American Ninja Warrior” like the Arm Rings, Salmon Ladder, Devil Steps, and the Pipe Slider. In that episode, I mention that some of my favorite grip strengthening activities include doing pull-ups or assisted pull-ups with as many different grips as possible, wrapping a towel around a bar and hanging from the towel, walking while holding some kind of heavy rock or a bucket filled with water, pinching two weight plates together with one hand, and even bouldering at my local rock climbing facility.
But you don’t need to be training for a TV show to benefit from these type of movements. As you’ve just learned, you can be a writer with wrist pain or a golfer with elbow pain and these same exercises, when performed properly and combined with a few other tips you’ll get towards the end of this article, can banish your frustrating pain.
I detail many of these grip-strengthening strategies in my answer to a rock climber on the podcast episode “The Best Ways To Increase Grip Strength.” The reason I go out of my way to find so many different ways to train my grip is because there are so many tiny muscles in your fingers, your hands, your wrists and your forearms that the greater the variety of ways you can train your grip, the greater the likelihood that your grip isn’t going to fail when you need the most. And the less the likelihood that you’re going to develop chronic repetitive motion injuries from things like typing, housework or other activities of daily living.
It’s also important to understand that (as I also detail in the podcast “The Best Ways To Increase Grip Strength”) some of your grip work should be heavy, short and explosive to build grip strength and the ability to grasp a variety of objects, while some of your grip work should be light, long and slow to build grip endurance and the ability to “hold on” for long periods of time.
Enter Yancy Culp
Last year, I hired a coach to help me stay motivated, stay accountable, get faster and more proficient in the sport of obstacle course racing. My coach’s name is Yancy Culp, and since hiring him, the grip strength and the mobility in my fingers, hands and wrists has absolutely exploded. So to give you even more insight on the nitty-gritty of how to increase your grip strength, I turned to Yancy to get his thoughts in to gain more insight into his techniques.
In Part 2 of this episode, airing in two weeks, you’re going to find out exactly what Yancy had to say, and you’re also going to find out some of the exact rehabilitation techniques I personally used to get rid of my own elbow pain brought on by with oodles of pull-ups, lots of typing, and those darn computer trackpads.
In the meantime, do you have questions about why grip strength is important or how to increase your grip strength? Join the conversation at Facebook.com/getfitguy.
About the Author
Ben Greenfield received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from University of Idaho in sports science and exercise physiology; personal training and strength and conditioning certifications from the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA); a sports nutrition certification from the International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN), an advanced bicycle fitting certification from Serotta. He has over 11 years’ experience in coaching professional, collegiate, and recreational athletes from all sports, and as helped hundreds of clients achieve weight loss and fitness success.