Why You May Be Struggling On Your Lifts
Sometimes pushing out rep after rep during your workout can leave your wrists more tired than your target muscles. If your wrists are feeling early fatigue before you finish your sets, you may have weak flexor and extension muscles in your forearm.
Strengthening these muscles can make your lifts go up dramatically when you start to focus on them, however, the overall grip strength over a dumbbell or barbell is determined by the many muscles within the hand.
While many weightlifters tend to skip handgrip training since it’s not a part of a regular 4-day split or full body routine, grip exercises can be beneficial for pushing through strength plateaus that frequently occur with intermediate lifters.
How to Get a Stronger Grip for Improved Strength
The muscles of the hand are one of the most functional muscle groups in the human body, with grip strength being used for opening jars, greeting with a handshake, or playing various sports regularly. There are 3 types of grip strength:
Crush Grip: muscles between your fingers and palm used to compress (i.e., shaking hands and crushing a can)
Pinch Grip: grip strength between your fingers and your thumb (i.e. dragging an object)
Support Grip: strength used to hold and carry for endurance (i.e., carrying grocery bags, farmer walks)
A popular method for improving grip strength has been the use of thick bars or Fat Gripz around barbells and dumbbells. Using thick bars forces neuromuscular strength to be directed to the hands and forearms, which makes curling movements increasingly harder.
Improving your grip strength when training becomes more effective when performing your common pulling movements in the gym (rowing, deadlifting, chinups/pull-ups).
Pinch grip exercises are the best choice for training for your compound lifts, so I would advise using Fat Gripz or a PVC pipe cutout around the bar for those exercises.
Farmer walks and sandbag carries work best for building support grip, which is especially useful for climbers and gymnasts that need large amounts of upper body strength.
The Wrap Up
Many of the compound and isolation movements in the gym require a threshold of strength from your forearms and wrists to move large amounts of weight. Alternating your strength training with thicker dumbbells and barbells can make vast improvements to your grip strength, which will eventually result in increased lifts with time. If you’re currently going through a strength plateau at the gym, proper forearm training may be your solution.
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