Anyone have any programs to progressively increase your grip strength? If there are any books, videos, internet info out there I would sure appreciate it. Thanks!
damn, just saw the other thread on grip strength, I'm suprised no one has posted "last week wants its thread back" - lol. One question though, what is Scrapper, or anyone elses favorite book on the topic?
This is a post by Faheem Chauhan from the Hardgainer.com round table. It's more for BBing, but still pretty close to what you are looking for...
"There are about four aspects to grip training, (well thats debatable as well, but it'll do for you)
1. Holding Strength
2. Pinch Strength
3. Crushing Strength
4. Wrist Strength
If you are to compete then you'll have to concentrate on all of these areas at one time or another.
When you're just starting out you wont need all of these and just a steady diet of Farmers Walk will do, but pretty quickly you can build these into your training. 1-2 grip exercises per session wont cut into recovery much and you'll enjoy doing them. When youre more advanced in a full training week you could cover a couple of exercises of each category in any given training week. But like anything you'll build upto that level and enthusiasm.
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Following on from lets look at the types of exercises you can do from each category.
Holding Strength - Static Holds, Thick Bar holds, Thick bar Holds, Farmers Walk (the Daddy IMO) Rolling Thunder, Hangs.
Pinch Strength - Pinch Grips, using blocks of varying widths, thin 1inch to very wide 3inch. Pinching plates.
Crushing Strength - Grippers, Grip machine, crushing cans, newspapers etc
Wrist Strength - PlateCurls, Wrist Curls (both reverse and regular) reverse curl (with varying width bars)
All can be done for multiple singles, for time, for reps, and many can be done with varying widths of bars and apparatus, whatever you prefer. Your individual preferences will vary as you progress and you may opt for rep schemes that are quite different. Bear in mind though for the sake of competition you will have to lift just one heavy attempt per try.
OK, so there we have a basic list of grip exercises, lets say you have trained of a steady diet of some basic grip exercises and are now sufficiently enthused about starting on something a little more advanced. You'll pick one exercise from each category.
1. Farmers Walk
2. 2 Hand Pinch
3. COC Grippers
4. Reverse Curl
Thats a fairly even list of grip exercises, so how to implement them into your routine? Well how well do you recover? If you feel you can handle it, a good schedule is to add two of these exercises to each session. Lets assume you train twice a week, M-W-F.
M - Reverse Curl, Farmers Walk
W - 2 Hand Pinch, Grippers
F - Repeat Monday
M - Repeat Wednesday etc.......
There you have it, work hard and work progressively, add weight to the bar as often as you can and keep form even. Go for it.
When you're more advanced and you feel the need for more variety (possibly tied into competition) you'll learn about many more exercises, you'll probably get many more exercise suggestions from RT members, grip training is one area with the list is almost non-exhaustive. By that time you'll know your recovery and will be able to arrange your routine to accomodate.
Faheem"
Go to ironmind and request their catalog. They
have a number of good grip training programs in
their catalog along with books and equipment you
can buy for grip training. Don't overdo it, if you do it
takes a long time to get over the injury. Warm up
well and be patient, you will make progress. Lots
of good information has already been posted
above.
Grandpab
www.cyberpump.com/gripboard has a pretty descent forum on grip strength. A lot of those guys have closed some of the ironmind grippers and are certified captains of crush (someone who closes an ironmind gripper)
Go to ironmind.com and buy John Brookfields book Mastery of Hand Strength,a must have for a grip master!Also join the Gripboard at cyberpump.com,they have a ton of info!