Adam C. Stewart
Grip strength can be the limiting factor of performance for many different strength athletes. Read this article to explore the science and practice of grip strength training and forearm muscle development for strength and aesthetics.
As the old saying goes, You are only as strong as your weakest link, and grip strength can be the limiting factor for many different strength athletes. Whether you are a Powerlifter, a strong man, a weightlifter, a Crossfitter or a recreational enthusiast who wants to be strong all around, life is better with a strong grip.
In this article, we will look at the science and practice of grip strength training and the development of forearm muscles. Although I am referring to strength athletes in this article, the same information can be applied to improve the grip strength of athletes in a variety of other sports such as climbing, Steeplechase, wrestling, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and archery. For readers more concerned about aesthetics than grip strength, this article also explains how to increase the size of the forearm muscles and which muscles have the greatest impact on the overall size of the forearm.
Types of handles
Overall, I’m going to divide grip exercises into three different main categories, recognizing that there are other legitimate ways to classify them and that my definitions are not used universally. The most common type is the support handle, which is used for a variety of strength training exercises such as deadlifts, rowing, pull-ups and farmer walks. Since most people who strive to improve grip strength prioritize the support grip, I will most often discuss this type of grip in this article.
Less frequently, the clamping handle is used, which, as the name suggests, can be formed with plate clamps or clamping blocks. The support grip and clamping grip exercises are both performed with static intention, but I consider the main difference between them to be the direction of resistance relative to the hand. If we consider our palm as a laser pointer, this imaginary Laser is directed closer parallel to the resistance line during a tightening grip exercise, while during a support grip exercise it is directed closer perpendicular to the resistance line. For example, during a mixed grip deadlift, the resistance is provided by gravity acting downward on the weight, while your palms are facing forward and backward. If we imagine a Laser pointing from the palms, an almost right angle is formed between these lasers and the gravitational force vector. When holding a weight plate with a clamping handle, the palm is usually directed downward, almost parallel to the gravity vector acting on the weight plate. Given this difference in orientation, a much lower load can be used for pinch grip exercises, where you need to create a high frictional force to maintain finger contact with the device.
The third type of gripping is crushing gripping, which is often dynamically trained using hand-held gripping devices, but can also be statically trained by trying to crush an object such as a baseball. Unlike support gripping exercises or pinch gripping exercises, which are usually stressed by gravitational forces, a pinch gripping exercise creates resistance inside the device. For example, a torsion spring usually provides the resistance when a handle is crushed. In accordance with Newton’s third law of motion, a force equal and opposite to its compressive force can serve as resistance during a static attempt to crush something like a baseball.
Although it is not involved in most gripping activities, pinch gripping is by far the most tested type of gripping force in research due to the accuracy, reliability and ease of use of the gripping test benches (72,165). The compression grip strength measured using a grip test bench is not only a result value that can be used to quantitatively monitor the progress of rehabilitation after a variety of upper limb injuries or neurological injuries, but also an indicator of overall health (24,26). Even in the control of muscle mass, researchers have reported that grip strength is inversely related to all-cause mortality and can be an even stronger predictor of cardiovascular mortality than systolic blood pressure (i.e. the peak on a blood pressure measurement) (67,109,110,127,144,146,164,171). Rather than simply being a causal link, I doubtful that the extent of this link is influenced by the positive association of grip strength with other health-promoting variables, such as whole-body strength and bone mineral density (115,159,177,209). Other strength measures such as the bench press and the 1rms leg press are also significantly associated with mortality risk, so that grip strength does not necessarily have a clear relationship with longevity compared to any other type of strength (71,204). For older women in particular, the decrease in hip flexion force is also more strongly associated with an increased risk of mortality than the decrease in grip strength (213).
However, the maximum grip strength can be tested more easily on the mass scale than other types of exercises that require a certain level of technical skill to be performed safely (for example, squats at 1 rpm) or expensive specialized equipment (for example, an isokinetic power test bench). Hydraulic test benches commonly used in clinical settings can cost hundreds of dollars, but a variety of different digital test benches can be purchased for about $30 and provide measurements reasonably similar to the gold standard (i.e. less than 10% of a difference) (134). In addition to using power test benches to find out if a grip strength training block was productive, some weightlifters will use these devices as part of an assessment of neuromuscular readiness similar to heart rate variability or vertical jump height (76,206). To my knowledge, the potential of measuring acute grip strength as an indicator of systemic fatigue in weightlifters has not yet been studied.
