One of my favourite parts of training beginners is getting them strong enough that their grip strength becomes a limiting factor in compound lifts. This may seem like an odd boast, but let me explain.
As your skill, confidence and strength grows over the first couple of months of training, you will reach a point where the target muscle of an exercise can tolerate more work than your grip can. This is a great early milestone in training, but it can quickly become an obstacle.
When grip strength fails, people usually notice the following symptoms:
- Unable to keep the hands closed around the bar/dumbbell;
- Burning forearms;
- Regularly needing to adjust the hands on the implement;
- Unable to concentrate on the exercise for fear of dropping the bar/dumbbell.
Should I Train My Grip Strength, or Train Around It?
Once you run into grip problems, you need to decide whether to work on grip strength directly, or work around it. Many people opt for direct grip training; after all, who doesn’t want a stronger grip?
It helps that many people associate a stronger grip with improved longevity, although I worry that people are misinterpreting the research that has been done on this topic.
However, I believe you should consider the following arguments for working around your grip strength issues instead:
Time Management
While you absolutely can train to get a stronger grip, you shouldn’t let this detract from your training time if it isn’t your main goal. If your goal is to build a stronger back or get bigger hamstrings, then you shouldn’t spend time working on your grip just so you can deadlift more.
Overall Potential
The exercises where grip is a limiting factor are usually exercises with a high strength ceiling. Things like deadlifts, rows, and pulldowns tend to be the most fatiguing on the grip. These exercises all have one thing in common – you can get really strong in these movements! This means that your strength in these areas will almost always increase at a much higher rate than your grip strength will.
Grip Strength Attrition
Even if you build your gripping power to the point where you can deadlift heavier or do a few more pullups, you still have to contend with accumulated fatigue. Your grip doesn’t just have to perform well on one exercise; it has to perform well throughout your whole training week. Some of this can be managed with sensible programme design, but you can’t completely avoid the fact that you’ll be using your grip a lot in strength training.
Grip Strength Solutions
Hopefully I’ve convinced you to train around your grip strength issues instead of waiting for your grip to get stronger. Once you’ve decided to work around your grip limitations, you’ll have a number of options at your disposal.
Lifting Chalk
Chalk dries the skin on your hands, meaning your grip won’t be affected by sweat and grease. It also improves the friction between you and the bar. Studies on chalk have shown people performing more reps on pullups with chalk than without. If such a simple change can help you get additional reps on an exercise, it really is a no-brainer.
You’ll have to check whether your gym is OK with you using chalk. Most gyms now have come around to the idea of liquid chalk. This creates a lot less mess than the bricks of chalk that you’ll see in weightlifting gyms. It’s good gym etiquette to clean the chalk marks off your equipment when you’re done.
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Lifting Straps
Lifting straps are the source of much debate in the fitness community, with many lifters refusing to use them out of pride. However, if you’ve read the arguments above, you should be able to see past this.
While chalk will improve your contact with the bar, your grip can still burn out over time. Straps provide an additional layer of support.
Lifting straps can be used to tie gym equipment to your hands, massively reducing the demand on your grip. Not only will this increase the amount of work you can do, it will also allow you to focus better on the area you’re trying to work.
Training Programme Design
This grip strength solution is often overlooked. When it comes to training programme design, your effort should be focused on managing grip fatigue during a training session. Here are some common solutions:
- Exercise selection – are you doing lots of grip-intensive exercises in the same day? Can you spread them throughout the week?
- Exercise order – think about what exercises are performed in quick succession. A superset of pullups and kettlebell swings is an example of poor exercise order. Sensible exercise ordering will mitigate grip fatigue by allowing you to recover in time.
- Week design – similar to exercise order, but over the course of the week. Heavy upper back work may likely have an impact on heavy deadlifts, and vice versa. These would ideally be programmed with 48-72 hours between them.
Summary
It may be tempting to use grip-fatiguing exercises (like deadlifts) as a form of grip strength training. However, if this detracts from your key lifts, you’re probably short-changing your training. You’re much better served by using chalk, straps, and sensible programming to offset grip fatigue.
Once the main exercises are finished, you can always focus on your grip using more targeted exercises.
If you need more help overcoming your strength training obstacles, let me know below.