Grip Training and Strongman, Part 2

In Part 1 of this series I wrote about how I got interested in grip training and performing various feats of strength. In case you missed it, my enthusiasm got the best of me and then overtraining led to various aches and pains that interfered with my progress in strongman. 

In Part 2, I will discuss how to plan this kind of training into your program. I will also touch on the three basic forms of grip strength and how they can assist you in the sport of strongman.

If you are a competitive strongman and you are getting into grip training I think you need to start slow. You must first prepare by working your entire arm directly. That means training the biceps, triceps, and forearms pretty much like a bodybuilder in order to strengthen the muscles and tendons, which are strained intensely by strongman events and grip work. 

While many are on the fence about direct arm work for strongman, concerned about overtraining the already smaller arm muscles and thus leading to injury, I think they do need to be trained. Of course, if you go crazy you can cut into your recovery and risk hurting yourself, but leaving those muscles proportionately underdeveloped can lead to injury too.

When I train arms, it's usually after I press and I pick one or two exercises for biceps, triceps, and forearms/grip and perform 3-5 sets of 10-20 reps. If I'm looking to start intense grip training again, my routine will look something like this:

Dumbbell curls

Overhead triceps extension

Reverse curls

Wrist curls

The first two are obvious but wrist curls and reverse curls work the flexors and extensors of the forearms as well as the brachioradialis. These will get trashed in grip training so it's best to prepare.

After a few weeks, I will cut a set or two from all three curl variations and begin adding the fun stuff.

The fun stuff, grip training, ultimately falls into three categories: pinch, crush, and support.

Pinch grip training really comes down to the thumbs. It is likely the biggest bang for your buck if you're looking into building stronger hands in general. It is most often trained by pinching together steel plates with the smooth sides out. Your fingers will be on one side and thumbs on the other. It can be done with stacks of 10s, 25s, 45s, and even York blobs (broken dumbbell heads).To add more weight to the plates, run a pipe or small bar through the plates and collar lock both ends. 

Adam Glass demonstrating his awesome pinch grip strength with over 260lbs!

Card tearing, which I wrote a bit about in the first article, requires tremendous pinching strength. You must pinch the deck hard enough so the cards don't fan apart. If you add tearing as one of your grip movements, be sure to have trained your reverse curls and hammer curls well to prepare your upper arm for this feat of strength.

Crushing grip strength is basically trained with grippers. From the cheap Everlast wooden handles to the Captains of Crush, grippers are the movement most associated with grip training. If you want solid crushing grip you have to train grippers because other forms of grip strength don't necessarily carryover.

While crushing strength is trained by the action of closing the hand, support grip is trained by holding a weight in your already closed hand. There is open and closed hand support grip training depending on if you are using a a thick bar or a standard bar. This is trained and tested by all varieties of deadlifts, Farmers walks and holds, Thomas inch or Monster dumbbell training, chin-ups and pull-ups, etc.

Of the three, support grip is the most commonly tested in strongman competition. We have to deadlift Olympic bars and thick bars, clean and press thick bars and dumbbells, and farmers walks are a staple event. 

Getting ready to continental clean an axle.

The others, pinch and crush, are not so much tested. But, if you wanted to have more well rounded hand strength and get the biggest carryover into your training I would train pinch.  The additional thumb strength can assist in picking up odd objects and thick bars. If you're like me and you need better support grip, you should start with improving your farmers both for maximum weight and distance.

Some people add levering as a fourth category but for the sake of brevity and simplicity, we can talk about wrist development instead. In my opinion, levering is a good way to start to build the wrists and provide the foundation for getting into steel bending. As steel bending puts tremendous strain on the wrists, the strength gained from levering will provide an easy, less painful transition.

Here is some classic levering above.

Here is another way to train levering, deadlifting it from the floor.

If you want to put it all together, here is just one example of how to incorporate extra grip training into your strongman routine.

Day 1 Press

Axle clean and press 3x5, then for the last set clean and press each rep 60s

Floor press 4x8

Pull-ups 4x10  (this is a good exercise to add fat gripz on)

Face pulls with band 3x20

Dumbbell curls 3x15

Triceps extension 3x15

Reverse curls 2x15

Wrist curls 2x15

Day 2

Deadlifts 5x3

Front squat 4x8

GHR 3x12

Seated calf raise 3x15

Day 3

Yoke. 2-3 runs timed

Farmers. 2-3 runs timed. Alternate between heavy weights and light weights for distance 

Stones. Alternate stone over bar and stone series.

Two hand plate pinch. Alternate weekly between dynamic and static pinches.

The above routine is actually quite grip intensive. Overall arm strength is built on Monday along with additional support grip training via pull-ups which can be done with an open or closed support grip. Support grip is tested again on Wednesday with deadlifts and really taxed Friday with farmers runs. Additional grip strength is built through pinch grip training after events on Friday.

For those looking to get into feats of strength, you could replace the pinch lifts with levering on Friday. After you make some progress with your levering, you should have a better foundation to begin tearing cards or bending nails.

If you have more questions or want more information, check out Part 1 where I list some good resources you can find online to get started with your training. And, of course, I encourage you to reach out to me if you have more questions on how grip and feats of strength can be incorporated into your strongman training.

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)