So you've started lifting more in the gym, fantastic. You're making progress with your exercises but something is stopping your deadlifts, rows and pull ups from progressing. You get to a certain weight or rep and then you can't hold onto the bar for any longer and it falls out. Or you begin to hold onto it at the very ends of your fingers, causing you pain in your elbow. You've got problems with your grip strength and it's hindering your progress so what do you do. Let me explain this one.
Forearms are often looked at an underrated muscle, people would much rather concentrate on their legs, biceps or chest. Which is a problem to begin with because in my opinion we should be training our entire body to avoid imbalances and injuries (also as a side point good forearms can make you're physique look better as it's the part most of the time on show). Your forearms are made up of over 20 muscles so don't just think it's one muscle that connects your wrist to elbow. Wrist flextion and finger flextion works the front of the forearms and wrist extension and finger extension works the back of the forearm. Your ring finger is your strongest finger and will be the one dominating your grip, however if the other fingers don't pick up the slack it can lead to pain at the elbows. Put the barbell deep in your palm and don't let that ring finger do all the work, just a little reminder.
What people will automatically go to is lifting gloves & straps. So lifting gloves will hinder your grip, you're increasing the distance from the bar to the middle of your palm. Which means you'll won't get as strong as grip, they will stop the bar from slipping as they increase friction. However a strong grip stops this from happening and that's what you want to be improving. Using them is like buying microwave meal to get around that you struggle to cook but then complain that the meal isn't as tasty as you want and your skills aren't progressing. Hopefully you can see my point. The gloves will also protect your skin from calluses, but like it or not. Your skin needs them to toughen up so shouldn't be avoided, however painful they can be.
Now lifting straps are different, your forearms are a small muscle in comparison to your legs for example so when you're trying for a PB of course they need some help in order to fully overload your legs. But you shouldn't become reliant on them, you need one heavy exercise where you don't use them so for me that's pull ups, barbell shrugs & barbell rows. And then I use straps for RDLs & Sumo Deadlifts.
So if your grip strength is lacking what can you do? Well firstly if you're not doing the above, start doing that don't become reliant on straps. But lets say you've never used straps what then. Well like any weaknesses you need to include exercises in your program to improve it. These can be a towel barbell hold, warmer walks, plate pinch there's loads of exercises out there. Even working your forearms can translate over to grip strength, so exercises such as the wrist roller (which works both the front and back of the forearms).
Forearms and your grip are still a muscle that needs to be worked but of course you don't want to be devoting loads of time to them unless it's a weakness. If you're smart with your programming and exercises and you may never need to do any extra work.
That's the blog for today, I hope you all enjoyed it.
Thanks
Cameron
Additional Sources:
Jeff Nippard - How To Build Huge Forearms: Optimal Training Explained (5 Best Exercises!)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfMxT_jXcPE&t=223s)
Athlean X - How to Get Jacked Forearms (CONTROVERSIAL!)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLj9pqGHoFw)