Top 9 Exercises for a Strong(er) Grip

Grip.  

• It identifies you as a pushover or a thing to be respected.
• It exerts control over things in your environment.
• It could save your life.
• It allows you to operate tongs so you can grill meat.
• It holds your whiskey glass.
• It links you to the bar.

As you can see, your grip is pretty ‘effin important. I don’t think many will disagree. So if that’s the case, why do so few train it seriously? Yeah yeah, I’ve heard it all before, my grip gets enough work from all the pulling I do, and while that may be the case, developing a vise grip is AWESOME. So even if it wasn’t functional, or important (it is), it’s cool, and I love it, so I am going to give you some grip stuff today. A monster grip has always been a needed item for me. It probably is for you too but you don’t realize it.

Play Baseball or Hockey? Your grip controls your bat/stick.

Do MMA/Martial Arts? You’ll be needing a beefy grip here too.

Are you in Law Enforcement? You better have a huge grip to control your weapon and a suspect.

I can do this for an hour, but I’m done with this part. So, as I said, I’ve always been interested in having a strong grip due to being obsessed with Strongman and strength from a young age, but also due to work. I hung drywall in school, I worked at the airport in the 80’s hoisting 50-90 pound containers all day, I worked for the Sheriff’s Department for a few decades and had to restrain one or two less than compliant subjects. All of these things needed a strong grip so I learned about how to train it. Bonus: Training grip gives you big ass forearms too!

Types of Grip

There are three types of grip strength:  

• Crushing
• Pinching
• Supporting

Let’s look at these individually. Crushing: This is where you simply close your hands and squeeze hard, as if crushing a closed beer can until it pops open. Pinching: This is where you hold things between your fingers and pinch them together. Supporting: This is a static type of grip strength where you are basically holding something tightly. It is often confused with Crushing grip. How do you develop the three types of grip? I am going to give you my three of my favorite grip exercises for each type of grip strength now. (In no particular order)

Here are my Top 9 Exercises for a Strong(er) Grip

Crushing:

1. Grippers: Training with heavy duty grippers, not the cheap plastic ones is probably the best way to develop crushing strength.

2. Fat Gripz: Add these to your training while you row and press and crush the shit out of them

3. Grenade Balls Use these for pulldowns, cable rows or whatever and crush them as hard as you can. Pinching: 1. Plate Pinch Curls Why describe them when you can just watch a video?  

2. Pinch Blocks: Use pinch blocks of different sizes to do a wide variety of exercises. Pulldowns, Pinch block deadlifts, rows 3. Hex Head Dumbell Holds Grab a pair of hex head dumbells and hold them for time by the hex portion. Supporting 1.

Thick Bar/Axle rows and Deadlifts: Thick bars have been around forever for a good reason. They work. Row, shrug and pull your way to a huge supporting grip. 2. Deadlift Holds/Vertical Hangs: These require no special equipment. Grab a bar loaded up with a heavy weight and hold it as long as you can at the lockout position of a deadlift. Or do Vertical Hangs for time. To do a Vertical Hang, just get your ass up on the chinning bar and hang on as long as you can. Or mix both in.

3. Tarzan Strap work: Tarzan Straps are pretty cool and they are versatile as hell. Rows, pullups, pulldowns, shrugs, deadlifts and whatever else you can think of. Do them with these and watch your supporting grip strength grow by the session! Oh and one more thing.

Buy a Gripedo!   Sure, it looks like the Anal Intruder 3000, but this might be my favorite grip tool on the market right now. It is so versatile it’s a shame I didn’t invent it. You can work many aspects of grip and forearm strength with it.  

• Do holds with the ball end.
• Stick it in sand and twist it round and round.
• Stick it on the end of a barbell in the rack and use it as a grip roller with multiple points of contact.

I love this thing and I am not getting paid to tell you about it. It’s AWESOME. There are tons more grip exercises you can do as well. Train all aspects of your grip, but pay more attention to the ones that your needs require more. Are you a Powerlifter? Supporting grip is your bread and butter. Law Enforcement? Pinching and crushing are huge here. Same for MMA. Stick Sport athlete (hockey, baseball, tennis, etc)? Crushing is your game. Leave a comment with your favorite Grip exercise for me! Thanks for reading. Did you miss last week’s log?





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C.J. Murphy

May 2, 2019