Forearm, Grip Strength Training, and Hand Strengthening Workout routines

Article by Jacob Blackhite

In my opinion, forearms and hands are some of the most underrated muscles in the body. You won’t actually add mass or help to build good-looking muscles when you do exercises for hand strengthening or forearm and grip strength training, but what you will do is increase your overall functional strength. General forearm strength is required for a number of different lifts. If you’re forearms aren’t strong, they can be a limiting factor. Also, when you begin performing forearm exercises, you may be astonished at how much better you can execute other lifts. In fact, if you were to improve your grip and hand strength, you would see benefits in sports that require grip, such as baseball, football, wrestling and martial arts.

Building strong forearms can help you get stronger at other lifts. If you don’t have the strength to hang onto the weight bar, it’s really hard to do a pull-up or a deadlift successfully. Broadly stated, the forearms tend to get a sufficient amount of work just through exercises involving pulling. However, it can be beneficial to add additional forearm training exercises to your routine.

When performing forearm movements, I typically like groups of ten repetitions. This is one area of strength training that I think benefits from a slight endurance approach. Forearm training is a good starting point for anyone hoping to gain functional strength and improve their ability to perform lifts, but those hoping to go even further should concentrate on hand and grip training.

In my estimation, it is possible to have great forearm strength without hand strength, but impossible to have good hand strength without substantial forearm strength. Grip strength training should help improve both hand strength and forearm strength.

To properly train your hands, you should try to include training for each specific grip type. For pinch grip strength, you can hold a heavy object such as a weight plate (or two weight plates) between your thumb and fingers. You can build supporting grip strength by grasping significantly heavy things, including dumbbells, or by hanging from a chin up bar. You can train your extensors, the muscles responsible for opening your hand, by wrapping rubber bands around your fingers and opening your hand against the tension.

For crushing grip strength, you’ll need hand grippers. You don’t want to use the popular versions that are sold in stores as they won’t give you the workout you need unless you do a whole bunch of reps. You’d get just as good a workout from simply trying to crush a tennis ball. Make sure you go out of your way to find Heavy Grips or Captains of Crush in order to get a truly beneficial strength training workout for your hands. They are products meant for hardcore strength trainers, and you will never lack a challenge, because these grippers offer 350+ lbs of torque resistance. You don’t need me to show you a full routine, just be sure to include a combination of standard squeezes with inverted squeezes and add in negative training exercises that require you to squeeze onto the heavy duty gripper for as long as you are able. Since hands do not require significant recovery time, it is possible to do these routines 4-5 times weekly. However, I typically perform these exercises three days a week.

If you haven’t given forearm, grip strength training, or hand strengthening exercises a try, I’d recommend including a few of the above exercises in your routine. When you improve your hand strength you will see the results in improve functional strength and your ability to effortlessly complete various pulling exercises. If you train effectively, you might even be able to do some of the amazing things that Bruce Lee was able to accomplish. As a beginning point, simply attempt to gain enough strength to haul a 60lb piece of luggage without relying on its wheels.