Grip Training for Martial Arts
Grip strength is broken up into several categories: crushing, pinching, and supporting. Crushing is often described as the action where the fingers close into a fist, like squeezing grippers until the handles touch together. Pinching is where the fingers and the thumb oppose one another on opposite sides of an implement, like lifting several dimes smooth-side-out, and supporting is where the fingers and thumb are wrapped around something like holding onto the bar in the deadlift or clean.
These are excellent starting points, but there is plenty of room to expand for martial artists.
An athlete who wants to build the grip strength needed to be a champion can go out and spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars on grip-specific equipment, but specialized equipment is not always necessary 100% of the time. Sometimes all it takes is a little imagination and resourcefulness to tweak a common lift and make it one that will throttle your grip and have you feeling the effects for days to come.
One of the simplest ways to incorporate dynamic grip training in your program is the use of towels in your workout.
One basic way to use towels to your advantage is with towel pull-ups. As you hang from the towel, you are now working vertical support grip, because the towel hangs straight down from the bar. If the swinging of your bodyweight makes the towel shift at all, you must react to this movement and clench even harder. If you relax your grip even for an instant, you will begin to slip down the towel and you will have instantaneously apply full grip power to keep from dropping off the towel. BINGO – you are now training your grip dynamically.
But dynamic support grip training does not have to stop there. You can also create a similar dynamic support stimulus by looping a towel over your kettlebell handle when performing swings and other kettlebell movements. With the towel, instead of the rather static supporting position you find your hands in when grasping the handle, now your hands must react dynamically to the swinging and inertia of the kettlebell.
And if you really want to make things interesting, instead of looping the towel around the handle, try wrapping it around the kettlebell handle. This will crank the difficulty level way up! With each swing, even light kettlebells will feel like they are trying to rip out of your hand!
Try this exercise outside the first time! If it does fly out of your hand, you don’t want it to blast through your gym wall or a mirror.
Until next time, keep training for the Grip of a Champion.
MORE INFORMATION: For additional information on Grip Strength training, check out the author’s extensive collection of Grip Strength training videos on his channel. There are hundreds of ways to build grip strength for athletes, and the author can show you how.