Lessons in Grip Training, Part 1

Beginning to Accomplish Feats of Strength

After dropping the farmers handles before the finish line for the second time in a  strongman competition I started looking for ways to improve my grip and for some reason that meant doing more than heavy farmers. I knew nothing about grip training except what people had told me and that was limited to wrist rollers and grippers. So I started looking around online to see what the best of the best did for grip and I found a whole world of training that I still, two years later, have just begun to scratch the surface of. 

Like any ignorant beginner, I watched some videos and read some blogs and quickly looked around to see what I could emulate. We had an Ironmind Rolling Thunder at the gym as well as axle bars. We had some grippers too. But I wanted to do something a little extra so I went to Duane Reade and bought some playing cards. This was to be my first "feat of strength." 

Over and over I watched Adam Glass tear mini decks in seconds. I saw another vid of lightweight pro strongman Zack McCarley tear two decks. I gleaned what I could from these and humbly started with a suit and continued to add 4-5 cards a day until I reached a full deck. It took me about 4 weeks to get through a whole deck but it was braced, meaning the deck was against my body. Then I started tearing away from my body and it was about two months until I could tear a deck in that fashion. 

I learned that all decks are not created equal. Duane Reade's Play Right brand was like tissue paper compared to Bicycle; and Bee, found in all the bodegas of NYC, was a total bitch. Even stranger still was the variances between decks of the same brand so every now and then my decks from Duane Reade would put up greater resistance.

I also learned that frequency was everything. If I tore every day or every other day I could eventually get through decks in about 30 seconds even with Bicycles. The video below was taken about five months after I started tearing and my frequency was not as high as it was a couple months before. It took me about a minute which among grip specialists is analogous to a year.

I will be much stronger in my next grip video. And bearded.

I wasn't limiting my adventure to cards. I pursued a second "feat of strength": nail bending. Shortly after I bought my first deck of cards I ordered my first bag of nails. When it arrived I watched some more YouTube videos and went to work. At first I wanted to bend with the reverse grip method since it was the hardest, requiring tremendous hand and wrist strength. This involves stabilizing the nail with one hand while the other hand takes an opposing grip and pulls it back over the top of your stabilizing thumb. It took a minute of straining to go back to a double overhand grip because I wanted to bend the heavier nails in my lifetime. 

Pat Povilitis can twist your head off.

Starting with the color coded Ironmind nails I found the White and
Green too easy and the Yellow really damn hard. It took me a couple of weeks to bend a Yellow and a few more weeks after that to bend the Blue. 

That left the imposing Red nail and that wasn't going anywhere. 

I soon ordered more nails and some bolts from Fat Bastard Barbell Co. to fill in the gap between the Blue and Red nails.  I organized and labeled them all from easiest to hardest and went to work again. This time, I managed to get to a grade 5 bolt and then to a grade 8 bolt.

Blue and Yellow nails among the lesser grades, some cards, and IronMind wraps.

Frequency was everything, but now it was hindering progress. After all this tearing and bending, spanning a solid six months, I started to accumulate lots of pain by overtraining.  

My method of bending, double overhand, put a tremendous stress on the tendons and joints of my upper body.  A lot of the action was isometric because a lot of the time I failed to bend the next hardest nail or bolt. My elbows and shoulders began to hurt at the joints. 

I tore my cards by stabilizing, or choking, the deck with my left hand and peeling the top off with my right hand. This looks like a heavy, tense cross body concentration curl. My right brachioradialis was killing me. My weight training was beginning to suffer. Picking up stones hurt. Pressing hurt. I had to lay off my destructive ways.

Now, I should reiterate that I did all of this to help me become a better strongman athlete. Instead I became an achy strongman athlete with some average "feats of strength" to impress the family at Christmas. And none of the things I bent and tore helped me with farmers...

This all leads me to my point and the subject of the next part of this article, which I will post soon:

1. Prepare your body for grip training before you delve into it. Adjust your training volume and intensity to handle the stress of grip work. I must add that bending and tearing was not a waste of time and didn't make me weaker, but overtraining did. The point: prepare yourself for added stressors and don't overtrain!

2. Understand that there are different types of grip strength and being good at one modality doesn't ensure success with another.

3. Success in grip sports like any endeavor takes a long time and a lot of hard work. This point, however obvious, always seems to get lost on us.

Lots of hard work and then two hours with Chris "Wonder" Schoeck and I destroyed more steel and cards than I thought possible. RSVP now for Chris' seminar at Global Strongman Gym on August 17.

If you want to accomplish some "feats of strength"of your own or get into grip training, check out these sites first:

Diesel Crew (Jedd Johnson)

Adam Glass

Chris "Wonder" Schoeck (Chris is the subject of the documentary Bending Steel and is featured in the NY Times and NY Post. Also, contact us at Global Strongman Gym to RSVP for his first seminar.)

Ironmind

The Gripboard (forums with tons of links and info)