Kettlebells aren’t the easiest tool to grab, and the ballistic nature of many kettlebell movements makes them even harder to hang onto. What’s more, your ability to grip, and grip tightly, actually facilitate stronger and more powerful lifts. And it all starts with your muscle fascia.

The Importance of Grip

The fascial lines of the body are many and varied. This article isn’t intended to be a primer on fascia but on better understanding it to enhance our training. The arm lines are particularly relevant to our grip needs. There are four of these lines, and all play some part in grip and its effect on supercharging our performance.

This experiment uses the principles of irradiation of muscle tension to demonstrate just how vital grip is:

1. Let your arms hang loosely by your side and notice where there is tension. Now make a fist. Notice it’s not just the muscles of the hand that are tight. The tension travels up your forearms.
2. Now grip even harder. Notice the abdominals engage. Observe how the tension is now not just in your shoulders but also the muscles within your shoulders. How you grip grip has the potential to activate every muscle in your body.

Let’s try our experiment again, this time to demonstrate the importance of the arm lines:

1. Grip as hard as you can, but focus on squeezing the thumb and index finger the hardest. You should feel the pec and delt engage forcefully.
2. Now focus on gripping hardest with the little and ring fingers. This time you should feel the muscles in the back — the lats, rhomboids, and rotator cuff muscles — engage.

Applying this knowledge to exercise is common sense, yet few people do it. The conclusion to make from these tests is that if the body is ready for pushing (via the pecs and delts being engaged), your grip needs to have the index finger involved. The opposite applies to pulling motions, where we want to make sure that the pinky and ring finger are in direct contact with the bar or bell.

Hand Position for Smarter Grip

The most common hand position when using kettlebells is a grip that slides the wrist into the corner of the bell where the handle and body of the bell meet. This allows the handle of the bell to run diagonally across the hand and minimizes discomfort on the back of the wrist.

Then, most folks will close their index finger and thumb around the handle. You may mistakenly believe this grip is acceptable. It’s not acceptable. This grip will actually decrease performance while increasing injury risk. 

Here’s why: During pressing, you need to address not only shoulder flexion but also shoulder stability. If the pinky doesn’t grip the bell, the rotator cuff won’t be fully engaged. And when it comes to swinging or pressing a heavy object overhead, you definitely want all the musculature of your shoulder to be engaged.

A better way to grip a kettlebell for pressing (or get-ups or snatching) is with the handle of the bell going directly across the hand, in line with the calluses. This grip allows both for use of the prime movers and for optimal function of the stabilizers.

Stronger Grip for Better Movement

If we extrapolate this for other kettlebell exercises, such as squats or swings, we can see these fascial lines connect the fingers to the muscles around the shoulder and also become muscles of the trunk on both sides. The front and back functional lines create two large Xs, one on the front of the body and one on the back.

The correct use of grip will switch on our postural control muscles and enhance all of our bigger lifts. For kettlebell squats, the flat grip is once again the better option (as opposed to the diagonal grip), since it activates the most support muscle.

Once you’re used to gripping this way, you’ll find your performance improves while your injury risk decreases. Changing your hand placement will perhaps make a difference in how much load you can move, but that shouldn’t be a concern unless you’re a powerlifter. Focus on how well your body can move and function as a unit.

More on Breaking Muscle:

• Get a Grip: 3 Ways to Grip a Deadlift and How to Get Your Grip Stronger
• More Insight Into Developing Grip Strength: Your Hand Digits
• Beyond the 2-Handed Swing: 5 Effective Kettlebell Movements You May Be Neglecting

The post This Kettlebell Grip Cue May Change Your Training for the Better appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Alexander Zass was a strongman in the circus, traveling around Russia for many years back around the beginning of the twentieth century. He was born in Vilnius, Lithuania and lived from 1888 to 1962.

While serving in the Russian army during the First World War, he was captured by opposing forces and escaped from prisoner of war camps not once – but a total of four times. Some of these were easy escapes, but not the last one (his captors finally caught on that he wanted to be free). Here he used his strength to break his shackles and bend the iron bars of his window to climb out of jail. As you can see, his amazing strength proved to be quite useful.

Zass was not a weight lifter but performed feats such as bending bars, breaking chains, massive support and carrying lifts, and even several teeth lifts. In this video, the only known footage of the man, you can see him execute several of these feats:

During his youth, as weightlifting equipment was not easy to come by, Zass made do with rocks, trees, and other items that were easily found. He made his first barbells by chipping holes into stones and inserting an iron bar between them. Here’s some more detail that Zass relayed on how he focused his efforts on hand strength, using what was available:

I commenced now to think a lot about developing great strength in my fingers. Many things I tried, all helping, some of which I will tell you. I bent thick, green twigs with my hands, these being better than dry wood, which would not bend much before it would snap. I practised this a good deal until my hands became so strong that I could bend even small boughs of trees till they broke. Also I tried lifting stones off the ground with my thumb and fingers, carrying them in my grip for some distance.

According to Zass, if you want to become super-humanly strong you must concentrate on the hands and wrists. These are the weak link in so many people’s training, that it is what often makes the difference between a strongman and a normal person. And as described by another famous strongman William Pullum, “The keystone of the Samson system is the development of the strength of the tendons.”

There is not a lot of muscle mass in the hands. Even the forearms don’t have much in comparison to other areas of the body. Much more of the strength to be gained in the grip is by developing the strength of the tendons and ligaments. In support feats, even bone strength comes into play.

But progressive work is where it’s at, and apparently always has been. In his writing, Zass shared what he believed to be one of the most important secrets of gaining unbelievable strength.

“The secret of all improvement in feats like this is gradual progress from one stage to another, the severity of the test only being increased by degrees that are hardly noticeable.” I’ve seen it all too often (and also done it myself). Too many people seek improvement too quickly and actually stunt their gains. Small, gradual progression may seem to take longer but gives better results in the long run.

Zass was also a big proponent of isometric exercises, where you resist against an immovable object. For training these he liked using handles connected by a thick chain. Here he explains the benefits of doing isometrics:

The great secret of developing strength is to do so in a way which will store up energy instead of dissipating it, and build up the stamina as well; and the only method I know which really does this is exercise against very strong resistance.

In the book The Mystery of the Iron Samson, some of Zass’s isometric training methods are discussed:

Modern research has shown that the duration of isometric exercise should depend on the degree of muscular tension. If 60-70% of maximum strength is applied, then the muscular effort should last 6-10 seconds. If 80-90% of maximum strength is applied, then the muscular effort should last 4-6 seconds, and at 100%, only 2-3 seconds effort should be exerted.

A great thing about isometrics is that they allow you to train at certain angles and positions that can’t be replicated by lifting weights or other exercises. Besides being a strongman, Zass was a phenomenal wrestler. This makes sense, as wrestling, if you stop to look at it, is a match of many isometric and isotonic exercises against your opponent, at many weird angles. Zass was, in fact, one of a great many strongmen with a wrestling background.

To sum up, Zass built his strength using what he had available. Without using modern dumbbells and barbells, he became one of the strongest men in history. He learned from others but also ended up developing his own system using a mixture of dynamic and isometric exercises, content to make small gains in strength over time, which led to amazing feats of strength.

References:

1. The Mystery of the Iron Samson, Yuri Shapshnikoff and A. Drapkin (Strongman Books, 2012, South Carolina) pg. 91

2. The Amazing Samson, Alexander Zass (Strongman Books, 2011, South Carolina) pg. 96, 180, 209, 233

The post Strongman Profile: Alexander Zass Teaches Us About Isometrics appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Although very few studies have been done on the subject of grip strength in relation to upper body strength and endurance, those that exist seem to indicate what I have suspected for a long time from my own training – having a strong grip means having a strong and resilient upper body.1,2 Let’s face it – having a double-bodyweight deadlift is a whole different animal when you can do it using a snatch grip without wraps. In addition, a huge host of muscles are involved in the act of gripping: four flexors (digitorum profundus, digitorum superficialis, digiti minimi brevis, pollicis longus), one extensor (digitorum), and three intrinsic muscles (lumbricals, interossei, adductor pollicis).

Strengthening these can help prevent many common injuries to the hand and forearm (those of you in contact sports of any kind know how much this can affect your game), and can help any injuries that do occur to heal much faster.

Types of Grip Training and When to Use Them

Grip training goes well beyond squeezing grippers or stress balls. After all, there’s more than one kind of grip strength:

• The Crush Grip is the grip between your fingers and your palm—the one you use for shaking hands and crumpling beer cans.
• The Pinch Grip is the grip between your fingers and your thumb. This can be further subcategorized into individual fingers + thumb grip.
• The Support Grip is the ability to maintain a hold on something for a while—think pull ups or long and productive shopping trips.

The type of grip training you do depends completely on its applicability to what you want to accomplish. Martial artists may find support grip training to be more useful for things like wrist grabs and such. Climbers may find pinch grip and support grip strength to be most useful. If you’re training to close Iron Mind grippers, well, you’d best do some crush grip training. I personally use elements of all three in my training—I find this keeps me from overtraining one style and gives me well-rounded strength.

How To Train Your Grip

There are many ways to effectively train the grip. Here are a few of my personal favorites:

Hanging:

Grab a pull up bar. Get your feet off the floor. Hold on for dear life. Many people find the limiting factor in their pull ups (or even in just doing a hanging stretch) is the simple ability to hang on to the bar. Hanging for time can be an excellent way to overcome this issue. Try holding the bar in different positions—chin up style (palms facing you), pull up style (palms facing away from you), neutral (palms facing each other), mixed (one palm in, one out), hook (fingers gripping the bar, palm, and thumbs off the bar), individual finger hooks, one arm hangs, and so on.

To make these more difficult, widen the bar you are using. You can do this cheaply by wrapping a towel or sweatshirt around the bar to the width of your liking, or by cutting two short lengths of PVC pipe (width of your choice) and cutting a slit down the side of each so that you can pop them over the bar. You can do this more expensively by purchasing a pair of thick grip tools from a sporting goods supply store. Another option for a pull up bar is to hang a rope or towel from it so that the middle is over the bar. Grab the ends and try to do pullups or hangs that way. If you are a climber or do Brazilian jiu jitsu, you will absolutely want to do some of these!

Farmer Carries:

My personal implement of choice for farmer carries is the kettlebell, but you can also use dumbbells, hex bars, straight bars, large water bottles, suitcases—anything you can carry that hangs from your hands. Pick up one or two and walk as far as you can with it. Make it challenging. This not only trains support grip strength effectively, but also is a heck of a full body workout!

Plate Pinches:

Get two weight plates, preferably with smooth backs. Stack them together so the smooth side on each faces out. Try to pick them up. Better yet, try to take a walk with them after you’ve picked them up.

Hex Dumbbell Lifting:

There is a tool many strongmen use called a “blob.” Many people make their own by cutting the ends off of hex dumbbells. As I don’t have any dumbbells I can cut apart at the moment, I turn them into pseudo-blobs by grabbing the hex ends and trying to lift them. This can be done two-handed (one hand on top of each end in a pinch-grip fashion), or one-handed (dumbbell on its side, one hand grasping the end widthwise). This is much more difficult than it sounds, especially if you have mini-hands like I do.

Hook Grip Kettlebell Swinging:

Kettlebell swinging for endurance, even without the hook grip, is a very tough grip workout. I like to do one-handed hook-grip swings and go until my grip just about gives out. Then I do the same number on the other hand without stopping (which gives my first hand a break), and keep switching back and forth that way. In addition to having major cardiovascular and fat-burning benefits, this will build great finger strength and hip power. To make it more difficult, widen the grip of the bell by wrapping a towel around it or wearing thick gloves, or even try wearing lotion on your hands (make sure nothing/no one breakable is in front of you!).

Plate Curls:

A wonderful way to build finger and wrist strength is doing plate curls. Grab a weight plate of appropriate poundage. Hold it in your palm with your thumb over the top and your fingers extended over the bottom. Do bicep curls like that.

Sandbag Deadlifts:

Fill a few trash bags with sand and load them into a canvas duffel bag, or buy a commercial sandbag. Do NOT use the handles of the sandbag. Instead, try to pick it up, deadlift style, by pinching/crushing the material of the bag.

Extensor Training:

At some point, you’re going to need to open your hands again. Get a rubber band off a bunch of broccoli, slip it over your fingers, and open your hand as wide as you can. Add more rubber bands as needed.

Don’t overdo it with grip training. 3-5 reps of 3-5 sets of intense grip work one to three times per week (experiment and see what works best for you) is enough. Now get out there and dominate!

The post The 3 Types of Grip and the 8 Ways to Train Them appeared first on Breaking Muscle.