Our hands are used for a lot of tasks, and the strength of our grip plays a vital role when it comes to executing these tasks. Whether it has to do with everyday life tasks such as opening tight jars, or deadlifting weights in the gym, you need a strong hand to tackle these things.
Therefore, to ensure that you have a good grasp on things (literally), you need to learn how to strengthen your grip. Since we know how important improving your grip strength is, we have compiled some tips that will help you enhance your grip strength whether you are at home or the office.
Exercise Categories to Improve your Grip Strength
A lot of exercises can be used for this purpose. However, instead of giving you a long list of these exercises, we will simply categorize them into groups. With this categorization, you will be able to improvise techniques to strengthen your hold.
Here are the categories:
1. Crush
The basic idea for this set of exercises is to close your hand around an object and squeeze as much as you can. While you can do this with any object, making use of gym equipment will go a long way and help you achieve your goals faster. Visit http://www.gripstrength.com to learn more about some of the pieces of gym equipment that you can utilize when carrying out crush exercises.
2. Support
This is almost like the crush; however, instead of testing or improving your closing/squeezing ability, you test and improve your holding ability. One simple way to do this is to make use of a pullup bar and just pull yourself up and see how long you can hold on before letting go.
3. Pinch
This involves widening your hands like a croc’s mouth and then grabbing hold of an object. To capture this technique, you need to ensure that your thumb is put under stress. The purpose of this technique is to make your thumb a power tool that enhances your overall hand grip.
4. Extension
Instead of tightening your hand muscles, this technique requires you to stretch them by extending those opposing muscles as much as possible. An average person’s opposing muscles are not strong; even bodybuilders and trainers often neglect these muscles. Therefore, focusing on this will make you one of the select few on the planet with strong opposing muscles.
5. Wrist Work
The focus of this exercise group is wrist movement as well as stability. There is no particular motion involved in this. All you need to do is ensure that your wrists are getting enough work by moving them in all kinds of motions. When done properly, it allows you to easily transfer energy to your hands from your body.
We recommend that you rotate through these categories. In other words, don’t get stuck on one particular group. You could incorporate all of them into your daily fitness program, or spread them within the week; maybe performing one category today, and then another group the next day until you go through all five.
How to Get a Strong Grip at Home
Interestingly, you can still improve your hand strength from the comfort of your home.
Here are a few ideas you can try out:
Grocery Bag Farmer’s Walks
Have you noticed how tough and strong grocery bags can be? Did you know that you can use them to your advantage in this case? Of course, you can. All you should do is fill the bags with anything that will make it heavy and then stand in a spot or walk around your home. If you aren’t shy, you can even move around your street.
Bar hang
Having a homemade chin-up bar can come to good use in this situation. It will help you to practice support exercises that will build your holding ability. Taking a minute a day to work on this will surely reveal improvements that you didn’t think were possible.
Barbell/Heavy Bar/Sledgehammer Levering
With any of the listed items, your goal is to hold onto the items and try to level them. Why this is difficult is because you are not to hold the item at the center. Rather, you are to hold it either at the end or slightly off the center. The farther you move from the center, the more difficult it becomes.
You can either lift it by your side to make the item parallel to the ground, or you can lift it to your shoulders left and stretch out your arm while balancing it vertically. Due to the difficulty and the risk of this maneuver, we do not recommend it for beginners.
How to Get a Strong Grip at your Office
You will not always be at home, and a high probability is that you’ll spend a lot of time at your workplace. Therefore, it is wise to find ways of continuing your exercise even at work.
Here are a few ideas you can try out:
Desk Stretches
There are different kinds of hand stretches you can perform without having to leave your desk. You could place your palms on your desk with your fingers backward and then stretch. A variation of that will be raising your palms off the desk while stretching. You could also stretch with your fists planted on the desk while bending and relaxing your elbows.
Rubber Band Stretch
Grab any of the many rubber bands on your desk and use them to stretch your hand. Put the rubber band around your fingers and then stretch as much as you can. If it seems easy you can use more than one rubber band.
This exercise can be done even while you are busy as you don’t have to fully concentrate to carry it out. It also aids in improving blood flow through your hands.
All these exercises will give you a firmer grip as well as a firmer handshake. Click here to learn more about what your handshake says about your personality.
Conclusion
The above is a quick guide on how to get a strong grip. We are certain that if all we have shared above is followed, you will have a very strong grip in no time.
