How To Improve Grip Strength (Free Program Included 🤫)

Grip strength is often overlooked, but if you’ve ever struggled to open a jar or carry groceries into your home, you know that having stronger hands is important to everyday life. Say goodbye to struggling with the pickle jar. 

Strength is a function of two things:

• Nervous system adaptation to the specific task.

• Muscle Size

Think about it this way, if your body was a vehicle, muscle size is the engine, and the nervous system is the driver.

So from there, we need to reverse engineer. We want to adapt our nervous system to the task of gripping and holding onto an object for a long(ish) period and grow the muscles involved with gripping (the forearms).

We’ll have two sets of exercises to support the two kinds of adaptation we’re looking to achieve.

By the way, nervous system adaptation AND muscle gain will both improve with each group of exercises.

1) Nervous System Adaptation

Essentially, we want to hold onto a weight for an allotted time. The Farmer Hold (both arms or single arm) or Dead Hang is our best bet here.

Why is the farmer hold better for nervous system adaptation as opposed to building muscle?

Dynamic movements, exercises with both a concentric and eccentric phase, are vastly superior for muscle growth. A Farmer Hold is a static contraction. So it isn’t the best for building muscle. But it will help you get stronger at the task of holding onto something heavy for longer.

2) Muscle Growth

Forearm growth is pretty simple. We want to train the wrist flexors and extensors by, well flexing and extending the wrists.

Here’s how to put it into a program:

• Day 1: Farmer Carry 3-4 sets x 20-30 seconds
  

  

• Day 2: Bench Wrist Extensions 3-4 sets x 12-15 reps

  

• Day 3: Bench Wrist Curl 3-4 sets x 12-15 reps