People tend to forget that having a strong grip may be important when it comes to sports. When exercising, exercises that can improve grip strength tend to be forgotten. On the other hand, it is actually important to improve your grip strength as it’s not something you should forget, especially in sports. There are some things you can do to improve your grip strength and here are some of them:
- Train Your Grip Often
By training your grip, you will cause an increase in grip strength, especially if you do grip exercises often. This is because your grip is something that can and should be trained every day. Whenever you are in a gym, or whenever you are having a sports day, you can always train your grip so that you will have an improved grip strength.
- Squeeze the Bar
One of the most powerful tools you can use to improve your grip strength is a bar. You can gain a lot of improvements in grip strength if you squeeze the bar with your hands during a set. However, it is advised to avoid letting the bar slide towards your fingers. You should keep it locked in the palm of your hand by wrapping your thumb around the bar to hold it there and squeeze it as hard as possible.
- Lift Heavy Things
You need to train your grip at the same time as the rest of your body. By incorporating pull-ups, bodyweight rows and heavy deadlifts, you can improve your entire arm instead of your grip only. You can keep adding weight to the rack deadlifts so that you will have a better grip challenge. For bodyweight rows and pull-ups, it is advised to switch grips every few reps. By doing this, you will train your forearms to adapt to various positions.
- Grip Builders
Another thing you can do is to use grip builders. There are various tools like fat gripz and towels that can be added to your workout to train your wrist. Even though adding weight to the bar would help you to improve, by using these tools, you can improve even more. For example, you can wrap a towel around the bar or handle of any tool to increase the thickness of the handhold.
- Don’t Encourage Weakness
Did you know that using tools like wrist straps and other things that aid your grip in the gym could make your grip weaker? This is because these tools encourage your body, specifically your wrist, to rely on help. This will make them weaker instead.
- Grip Exercises
There are a lot of grip exercises you can do to improve your grip as some of them are already mentioned above. However, we are going to discuss some more exercises below:
- Hex Holds
Hex dumbbell hold is a great way to challenge your open grip. You can purchase this tool to, or maybe just the heads of the hex dumbbells from stores. All you have to do is to hold them for 30 seconds, and a couple of sets would be more than enough.
- Farmer’s Carries
Farmer’s carries is when you stand up and walk a certain distance for a period of time while holding weights. This is usually done with two kettlebells or dumbbells. This exercise is good because it adds motions to your grip, which means that you will not only improve your grip strength, but also the strength of your hips, shoulders and core muscles.
- Barbell Holds
Another thing you can do to train your grip is by setting up in a squat rack and set the pins under where you will lock out a deadlift. The goal is to hold the weight, not to lift them up. You can do 3-5 sets to start.
- Fat Gripz
The next thing is fat gripz. This is one of the best equipment you can use when you want to improve your grip strength. In addition, this tool can be used with any standard dumbbell, pull-up bar or barbell, which can be very convenient. It’s advised to use them periodically, once or twice a month would be enough.
- Plate Pinches
To exercise your pinch grip, plate pinches is recommended. All you need are two plates. However, you need to make sure that they are flat on one side so that you can pinch them together.
Grip Strength Exercises without Equipment
The exercises mentioned above require equipment or tools, which can be a problem when you do not go to the gym or have them in your house. Fortunately, you can train your grips without using any equipment. For example, you can incorporate some forearm exercises in order to work the whole range of muscles that are connected to your wrist. Exercises like push-ups and chin up are really great with this. You can also lift heavy weights that can be found in your daily life and just hold it while walking, which is similar with farmer’s carries, only without any equipment needed.
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