Grip.

It’s important. You don’t get through the day without using your hands to hold onto something.

Sure a lot of the tasks in our modern world don’t require much grip strength, but like many things in life stronger is better… rare is the time when something is “too strong”, more often you run into the problems of “too weak”.

In shooting sports, especially with a handgun, grip strength matters when it comes to management of recoil.

When lifting heavy weights, grip strength matters.

I started having some issues with my left hand’s grip strength when deadlifting. Switching to mixed grip helped, but I still want to work on my grip. Granted, one of the best things is to ensure a rock solid grip when I do any of my lifting no matter the exercise… no letting my hands just hook onto the bar, grip the bar. But the other day I was browsing around the EliteFTS website and thought why not… I’ll get some grippers.

These aren’t your normal grippers that you can buy at the sporting goods store

These are Captains of Crush hand grippers. They’re much higher quality and much more difficult to close. But how difficult depends, because they make a wide range of them.

I picked up the Sport, Trainer, and No. 1. The Sport is the second in their lineup, rated at 80# of pressure to close. The Trainer is next in line, rated at 100#, and the No. 1 is next, rated at 140#. I really wasn’t sure where to start, so I figured to get all three, especially because that works progressively because hey… getting strong doesn’t mean squeezing a light weight for thousands of reps. It’s like any strength training: doing a 3×5 or 5×5 set with maximum intensity. Plus a little warm up.

I have no problems closing the Sport, and the Trainer I can close well enough to provide me my initial workout — this is my work load. The No. 1? With my right hand I can close it if I’m fresh and dig in. My left hand can’t fully close the No. 1.

There’s a lot to grip training, well beyond “crush strength”, but this is a reasonable start for me as something to add in. Plus, I’m not just going to crush but crush-and-hold. Grip isn’t just grabbing and letting go, but grabbing and holding. So any work I do will involve crushing and holding for a period of time. Exactly what my workouts here will be remains to be determined, but I figure it will be something I do on my way home from the gym… just stick the grippers in my bag and squeeze while I walk home. Multitasking. 🙂

We’ll see what difference, if any, it ends up making on my grip strength.

You may have noticed another thing in the first picture: Liquid Chalk. Purchased that on a whim, knowing nothing about it. I can’t use true chalk in my gym but hey, if I can have something to help my grip, great. Now, from shooting I know about Pistol Pro Grip but honestly I don’t like that stuff because it leaves a white residue/mess everywhere and I just don’t like how it makes my hands feel.. almost too dry, but no question it works. But that won’t fly in the gym since it leaves a mess. So this Liquid Chalk? We’ll see if it helps any. I have sprayed it a couple of times on my hands at home just to see what it does and it does leave a bit of a “dry” chalk-ish-like feel on your hands, but I’m not sure how well it will actually help. Plus, as I now read various reviews, it appears the spray clogs up pretty quickly. Hrm. We’ll see.

In the end, improving my grip is good. I see no downsides to it. We’ll see how well these products help.