April 21, 2020

Grip strength is an often over looked aspect of sport performance but if you simply cannot hold on to a jersey or limb to make a tackle or a barbell to complete a lift you aren’t much use to anyone. Starting work in a printing factory after high school I encountered some real mutants, manual labor is the birthplace of scary unnoticed strength. We would grab pallet after pallet of paper by hand the constant twisting of the wrist and having to keep a constant vice like grip lead to many of my chain smoking colleagues to have bowling pin forearms often much larger than their upper arm. The acclimation to this was brutal and my wrists ached for months until they finally thickened enough to withstand the constant abuse. I look back on those three years with some fondness as I met some great people but the stand out memory as a S&C coach is the crazy pinch and crushing grip those guys possessed.

How do I now apply this to my athletes, powerlifters usually get away with little to no grip work. Hell, you can just pull hook if you can tolerate it. Moving into more mainstream sport that I work with such as boxing and football now we must incorporate some real directed training to aid performance and decrease the chance of injury. Boxing has the continued pounding effect on the wrist and forearm leading to chronic injury, I have been able to circumvent this with loaded fat grip carries, tension through the elbow to relieve compression and constant grip load in the holding of the weight. This method has also worked well with QBs during the football season who place enormous load through the throwing arm, sometimes leading to UCL blow outs.

I am not saying grip training is a fix all component to add to you training but it is likely something that has fallen through the gaps and would benefit from some attention. Happy griping.