Looking to build up your grip strength? If so, there are some main movements that you must consider. If you take the time to include grip strength training within the context of your workout sessions, you will find that you get superior results from your training – because now you will never be hindered by a weak grip.
As it’s often seen with lower body exercises such as lunges or deadlifts, if your grip isn’t strong enough, you will only be able to lift so much weight before you can no longer hold onto the bar. Having a strong grip will prevent this so the muscles you’re aiming to target can continue gaining strength.
Let’s look at three smart ideas to remember for building grip strength.
Include Suspension Exercises
One of the best kinds of exercises that you’ll want to include in your workout program to develop grip strength is suspension exercise.
For example, one of the top movements here would be grip hangs. What you’ll do is place a very strong and thick towel over a sturdy overhead bar and then hang off the towel. If you can perform a pull-up action while doing this hang, even better!
Grasping that towel as you do this is really going to challenge those grip muscles. And it’ll dramatically boost your strength.
Another suspension exercise that you can include is bicep curls with a towel. For this one, wrap the towel around the bar of a dumbbell and then perform the curling action.
Since your hand is in a completely different position as you hold onto the weight, you’re going to challenge the grip muscles much more than a regular bicep curl would.
Add Some Static Holds
Moving on, you should also consider adding some static holds to your workout program for grip strength. One great movement for this is a simple static barbell hold. To make this movement even more difficult, wrap a towel around the bar before you bring it into the holding position – so your grip is even bigger than normal.
Then, hold it directly in front of the body with the arms bent at ninety degrees for up to 60 seconds. This exercise is also going to be a great test for your bicep endurance strength as well, so aim to perform it on a day when you’re already hitting the arm muscles.
Don’t Forget Your Fingers
Finally, in order to really improve your grip strength you must not forget to include some finger strengthening exercises. Since your fingers will be very involved in squeezing the bar as much as possible in all your lifts, they cannot be left out.
One of the top movements for increasing finger strength is to perform fingertip push-ups. For this movement, you simply get down in the standard push-up position, only rather than placing your palms on the floor like you normally would, you’ll balance your body directly on your fingertips.
This one will take some practice to get used to, so allow yourself to work at it until you are able to do five to ten full push-ups like this. If you can incorporate all three of these movement variations into your grip strengthening program, you will be targeting all aspects of your grip and helping to develop the well-balanced strength to the very ends of your fingers.
Leave a Reply