Hammer Strength:

First thing, let’s just make the thumbs-up sign with one of our hands (well, I’m typing, so I’ll have to do this with some interleave, but rest assured, I was following along at home). Now, with your wrist in a neutral position, push your wrist downward, such that you’re pushing the thumb outward without actually moving said digit. That’s the extension phase of this movement. From there, bring your wrist back, beyond neutral and to its fullest upward flex, such that your thumb comes nearer to you. That’s the movement. It can be trained by moving the wrist willfully through this arc, or by holding the wrist static under load going one way or another.

What is involved here? Primarily, there’s the tendon and ligament strength of the wrist itself, the large muscle of the forearm, and the biceps brachii on the upper portion of the forearm. This is the sort of movement that manual laborers do, and the reason that people who chop down trees, swing a pick axe, or dig ditches for a living are not to be trifled with.

It may come as a shock, but the most straightforward way to build hammer strength is…with a hammer. Depending upon your initial strength level, the size and weight of the hammer can vary. If your wrists aren’t yet made of whipcord and spring steel, perhaps a 16 ounce framing hammer with a long handle will suffice. A step up from there would be a mini-sledge, as these often weigh around 4 pounds. Full length sledgehammers are a great way to go, especially if you’d like to work on generalized strength while training your grip and wrists. Full sledges are available as light as 6 pounds and as heavy as 24, without going into massive, loadable sledges that are available from places like Strongergrip.com. Your “hammer” of choice doesn’t have to be a hammer at all. As long as it’s heavy and somewhat long, and you can grip it and hit with it, you’re good to go. Maces, splitting mauls, baseball bats, clubs, sturdy tree branches, and the like can all be used in this way. Some are just less robust than others.

As with any long-axis, weighted object, you can “choke up” on your hammer at the beginning, and gradually add to the dynamic load by moving outward to the end of the handle. If a sledge gets too easy using both hands, try just one, and you’ll find that the challenge comes right back.

The easiest way to train with a hammer is to hit stuff with it. Bereft of a job that requires driving lots of spikes into rail ties or the like, we’ll want a springy, tough medium to hit. Old truck tires are great for this, but you could swing away and hit anything that’ll blunt the force of your swing and not blow into shards, and you’ll be fine. Remember to swing while “leading” with both hands, to give you a symmetrical load. You can also swing from various angles, if your target will stand this. Please don’t hit your foot or lower leg, and think seriously about steel toed boots to do any ground-based hammer bashing.

Swinging a hammer is not the only way to go. A slower, more controlled movement can also yield dividends. This is often referred to as “levering” with a hammer. To do this, take a comfortable grip on a full sledge and hold it, straight up, at arm’s length. Now, let the hammer come backward under muscular tension until it touches your forehead. The object here is not to move your upper arm or let your elbow “break” upward during the movement. This should be all wrist, if possible. Only grab with the whole arm if you’re about to lose control of the hammer. At the touch, drive the hammer back to being perpendicular to the floor, steady it, and go again.

At the beginning, if you’re a little scared that you’ll give yourself a shiner, choke way up on the handle, so that the hammer head won’t reach to anywhere near your face. You can work up to longer lever arms and heavier hammer heads as you get more confident. What about the other direction, you ask? You can to the very same movement, except moving the hammer head outward beyond your wrist, to the extent that is a comfortable extension, and bring it back to perpendicular with the ground in the same way. You may find that you’re not as strong this way, as a smaller muscular complex drives this action.

Other Ways to Train:

One of the exercises you may see in the gym from time to time is to do a biceps curl with the wrist in the neutral position. This, the Hammer Curl, is a good exercise for the flexing phase of the hammer movement, and will certainly pack beef onto the top of your forearm. It is possible to train, indirectly at any rate, the extension phase of this movement by doing dumbbell triceps extensions, as well. These, however, are probably not as efficient at targeting the wrists and forearms directly as using a sledge.

Exercising with sandbags or lifting odd objects like stones will work the muscles and connective tissues in the wrist, as will work that involves ropes. As with many of these things, there’s a crossover, and any one exercise will generally target multiple elements.

What’s It Do?

If there’s anything that this specific measure will allow you to do, it’s open jars, bend or rip objects, and hang onto things at odd, challenging angles. Often, we think our wrists are as strong as they need to be, but I will submit that I was surprised and disappointed the first time I tried the reverse bend or “Terminator” bend of a nail. There’s a lot that traditional gym exercises do not do. Training your wrist to work against extreme loads is certainly one of them.

Next time, we’ll be finishing up with good, old fashioned forearm strength.

Wrist Rotation Training:

The human wrist is a complex little monster. There’s all sorts of things going on in there. Thus, there are a few different ways to go at training the wrist. Now, more than a few of your traditional gym exercises, and certainly many “work” tasks will stress our wrists, but we can go beyond that and into the realm of specific wrist training.

What we’re discussing here, the wrist rotation, is easily understood. It’s the thumbs up, thumbs down movement. The two bones of our forearms are rotating from the elbow through the wrist, and the small bones of the wrist itself (as well as the hand beyond) are just along for the ride. At least, until there’s a load on the movement. Then, the dynamic part of the movement (creating the power), is happening in the forearm, and across the radius and ulna bones. The static element is in the wrist itself, and the hand, where the hand must maintain grip (we’ve been through that already), and the wrist can’t cave in and fail to support the action.

The most familiar movement along these lines is the turning of a screwdriver or a door knob. The most commonly done exercises in the gym that target this area (supination and pronation of the wrist) are the supinating biceps curl, where the dumbbell rotates from thumb-up to thumb-out position during the movement, and the rope triceps pushdown, where one grasps a rope with knots on the end and extends the arm while flaring the hands outward from thumbs-up to thumbs-in position. Now, neither of these movements is specifically targeting our rotational strength on purpose. No, they’re rotating the wrists for the purpose of putting additional torsional stress on the big muscles upstream, the biceps and triceps. Nevertheless, they do give us something to consider, and a possible rationale to do the much-maligned “vanity” exercises.

It takes a little bit of imagination to figure out how best to stimulate this movement with simple and inexpensive household items, but I have a few thoughts for you. This particular entry will almost have to be backstopped with a video at some point, so be on the lookout for said video, when I have the time and energy to make it.

A Trick with a Towel:

The simplest way to train wrist rotation is to find a towel that is thin enough for you to easily grasp the gathered ends of said cloth when it’s folded over a railing of some kind. Once a suitable towel can be found (it should be tough terrycloth, nothing that might rip if put under pressure), find a STURDY railing or bar that is in a solid emplacement, and, with the towel rolled up in a fairly tight bundle, fold it in half around the railing. Grasp both ends, with one hand grabbing it around the end. Sort of like the end of the towel were a door knob, if you catch my drift. Now, use both hands to twist the towel until it is taut and difficult to twist any further in that direction. Holding the towel with the hand you want to train, twist the towel further, hold for a few seconds, then go back to your initial position. Keep doing this until your forearm and wrist start to really burn. Now switch hands, turn the towel in the opposite direction, and train the other wrist. You’ll want to do both wrists, and in both directions. It’s quite possible that your off hand will fatigue more quickly, and that you will find you have more strength twisting in one direction than the other. The wrist isn’t symmetrical, and we often have significant disparities between our favored and clumsy hands.

It will probably take no more than three turns through our rotations and hands before we’re tired. This one, since we have to hold hard on the towel, is also going to give us some grip benefits. Don’t be surprised if the towel is a little tougher on your hands than you would have thought possible. If it gets easy, get a thicker towel, and give it more twists to preload it with more resistance.

The Bendy Stick:

If we’re willing to look around the house a bit, or perhaps buy something of low cost, we can do things another way. The idea here is to flex a rod or pipe that will deform and then resume its prior shape. So…

Find a pipe or bendable stick/rod, hold it at arm’s length in front of you, at about chest level. Your hands should be spread as far as you’re comfortable with initially. This will give you the most leverage on the stick in question.

There are two hand alignments possible with this one, palms up and palms down. With palms up, we’ll bend the rod by twisting both wrists from thumbs-out to thumbs-up, resisting the temptation to bring the stick inward. This is just wrists, not chest and shoulders. If you can’t budge the stick without pulling the stick toward you, find something more pliable.

The idea is that you bend the stick as far as you can (or should, if it has some limit of elasticity), then ease it back to straight, then do it again. This can, and should be done with both the palms up and palms down for full coverage.

A set of stick-bends goes until you either can’t bend the stick, or have a lot of blood rushing through your forearms and wrists, and find it uncomfortable to go on. It probably will only take a few times through for most people to tucker themselves out on this one.

Ideas for things that you might use as bendy sticks include fiberglass driveway marker rods and lengths of PVC plumbing pipe. Remember that the closer you grip the stick (distance between your hands), the higher its stiffness will be, so you have a certain level of variability for any given stick. A method for increasing the challenge of a given stick would be to start at a particular distance between your hands, and come in a half an inch every few sessions.

Although common sense would dictate that certain materials (most wood, some plastic, anything that might shatter and put an eye out), aren’t suited to being your stick for this exercise, I will mention it here anyway. If you have ANY reservations about the structural soundness of the stick you’re using, please don’t use it. PVC, for instance, is literally a few dollars for ten feet of the stuff. There’s no reason to put yourself in harm’s way.

A Metronome Made of Hammers:

A final thought on this one is to hold a hammer out at arm’s length, then move it back and forth on the axis, like the arm of a metronome. In other words, going from thumbs-in to thumbs-up to thumbs-out, to whatever level of flexibility is comfortable to you. The heavier the hammer’s head, the harder things get. The longer the handle, the more leverage and effective strain. With a long handed hammer or mini-sledge, you can gradually increase your rotational strength from, “honey, can you open this pickle jar,” to, “I don’t really need that oil filter wrench.”

Next time, we’ll talk about “hammer style” wrist training.

Opening Our Hands:

The thing to remember about our bodies is that they work in such a way as to create systems of pulling and pushing, of opening and closing. Most of the discussion we’ve had here is about keeping our hands closed, but anyone who’s typed a paper or played the piano understands that the back of the hand, the part that moves the fingers upward and outward, is also important. We don’t want to create an imbalance in the tension between the gripping muscles and those that open and spread the fingers, so we have to consider how best to exercise these small muscles.

Now, the mechanisms that open our fingers are never going to be even close to those that shut them, in terms of strength. The hand is not a symmetrical system in this way. That said, we should still consider what we can do in this regard.

Luckily, it’s simple. All you need is one or more heavy elastic bands from your desk drawer. Put your thumb and fingers all together, such that they form a cone. Slip an elastic over them, possibly doubling it if it isn’t tight with a single loop. Now, force your fingers apart and hold for a beat. Now relax. Now do it again. There. You’re working the antagonist muscles of the back of your hand. This will tend to be a high repetition exercise. I like 20 to 50 reps for something like this. One set should probably be fine. You’ll be surprised at how quickly your hands start to complain about this simple little exercise the first time you try it.

Hand and Finger Toughness:

Here, we get evil. We do things that aren’t very nice to our hands, so that they’ll be rugged when we need them to be. We’ll build up the depth of the skin in various places, and we’ll get them used to resisting against otherwise unknown force vectors.

First, the knuckles. Here, your only stop can be the old boxer’s standby, the pushup from your fists. Start on a soft mat or grass, then go to carpet. There’s no need to go to hardwood or concrete, as these will hurt more but not be a lot more effective. These pushup also strengthen your wrist, so if you do have to jolt someone in the jaw, you’re less likely to have your wrist cave in on you.

On to the second digits. From a fist, rotate your fingers outward so that the middle knuckle is foremost. Think about how an ape knuckle-walks, and you’ll have it. From those knuckles and your thumbs, do pushups. Everything said about the fist pushups above goes for this one, too. Even tougher on the wrist, and this one brings the thumb into it in a big way.

Finally, we’re talking fingertip pushups. At first, just assume the position and see if your hands will hold you. If they won’t, work up to it. If you can do a number of legit fingertip pushups, your hands are going to get tough, guaranteed.

Finally, you can do what baseball pitchers have been doing for many years to get their hands strength and toughness up there. Get a small bucket and fill it with rice. With your hand shaped like a blade (fingers straight and pulled together, thumb held tight), plunge your hand into the bucket up to your wrist. Now make a fist, displacing the rice as your hand moves. Yeah, you probably won’t be eating the rice afterward.

Fingertip Strength and Hook Grip:

Being able to grasp with our fingertips and either squeeze or hold is a final consideration. Who needs this? Anyone who works with their hands, but specifically athletes that need the ability to grasp and hold, no questions asked. Mountain climbers, football players, and wrestlers, for instance.

One of the best ways to gain fingertip strength is to work with sandbags, or some other chaotic and shifting load. A small polypropolene or burlap bag with sand, beans, rice, or pea gravel will work. I could expound about the coolness of sandbag training all day, but for this one, the primary method is going to be putting your hand against a plain side of the sandbag, palm flat, and simply squeezing material into a grasping point, then lifting straight off the ground. The way I’ve enjoyed doing it the most is with a bag filled with recycled rubber. From standing, I slap my flat hand on the bag, grasp it, hoist it up, and throw it toward the ground as hard as I can. I call it the “swoop and slam” move. Alternating from hand to hand, not only is it a fantastic fingertip strength exercise, it’s also a massive cardiovascular load and a move that will release any pent-up stress you might have.

No one needs hook grip like a climber. How do you get it? Well, find some ledge, rafter, or other place where you can only hang on with the last two knuckles of your hands, no thumbs. Do dead hangs or pull-ups that way. It’s awesome…for a given, painful definition of awesome.

Are there other ways to train hand strength? Sure. Tons of ‘em. I’ve only scratched the surface here, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that, if you’re doing several of the exercises I’ve mentioned, your hands are going to enjoy a serious increase in strength.

A word about pacing yourself:

As with anything else, expect some soreness when you first start doing these exercises. Treat them like any workout regime , giving your body enough time to heal. How long that is depends on a lot of things I don’t know, so I can’t give you any hard and fast rules. Every other day is about as much as I’d recommend, though. If you have any serious, lingering pain, or marked swelling in any joint, take it easy for a good week. Because hands are, well, handy, I’d say that doing the cold/hot/cold treatments on them would be a great idea if you’re feeling stiff.

Next time, we’ll go into wrist strength!

Pinch Grip Strength:

The ability to pinch down on an object and control its movement is a very useful but rarely trained thing. Pinch grip helps us a lot when we’re ripping things and picking up odd objects that don’t have a good gripping surface. It isn’t hard to notice that, as we age, our ability to do things with our hands is often curtailed. Arthritis is often blamed, but the simple fact of the matter is that we don’t keep our hands strong. How often have we seen an elderly friend or relative struggle with ripping a single envelope of junk mail? Let’s not be that person. Let’s train some pinch grip, people.

Construction materials are classic, ideal implements to train pinch grip. Bricks and cinder blocks are both really fantastic. If you’re just starting out, and your pinch grip needs work, just reaching down and gripping a brick, then supporting it with the grip between your thumb and fingers will be a good starting point for many. Move your grip further and further toward the edges to control the twisting force of the brick as you get more confident.

From bricks, we can move to larger cinderblocks. You’ll find a variety of looks and sizes in the home improvement store. Try ‘em out. They’re usually less than three bucks. The classic “figure eight” cinder block with two square cells is the gold standard here. Literally anything you do with a full cinderblock is going to work your grip like no other. There are videos here that demonstrate some of the ways to do this stuff. Remember, with any type of brick, block, or other rough surface, you HAVE to wear some gloves. I mean it.

Other stuff in this vein? 2×4 boards can be used like a barbell, with a few buckets of sand or some other heavy material hung from them. Just pinch from the top and hoist ‘em. There’s no reason to make these things overcomplicated. I say that it’s better to think your way toward your goals, rather then try to spend your way there. There’s a cheap-ass way to get there with every type of strength I’ll mention here, I guarantee it. If I haven’t thought of it, hey, that just leaves a little for your own imagination to grind upon.

If you have access to gym equipment, weight plates are EVIL when used to train pinch strength. Start with two or three five pound plates, pinched together and raised off the ground (careful of your feet here, as with anything you pick up). Work your way up until you can pinch the big 45s together and pick ‘em up, and you’ll have gone somewhere.

The worst of all evils with plates is the plate curl exercise. While this is a somewhat static-based strength, because it is a primary thumb training method, I’ll include it here. the idea is that you pinch a weight plate from the edge, then lever it up in a curl. This is also a brutal test for your wrist. A person who can plate curl a 35lb plate is a bad mama-jamma, but a person who can do it with a 45 is to be regarded with fear and awe. I’ll try to post up a video of this in the near future, so you can see what I’m talking about.

In the end, anything you can exert force upon in a pinching vector (hopefully not another person!) can help you train in this way. Pinch strength, if taken to the extreme, can allow certain light but strong individuals to do things like jumping up and grasping the rafters in a basement and holding on. The absolute pinnacle of pinch strength is the pinch block pull-up. For most of us, though, that’s not going to happen. Pinch grip is also highly stressed in doing things like bending coins, ripping phonebooks, and ripping decks of cards. In daily life, thumb strength can be a strong benefit to athletes in contact sports, anyone who works with their hands, and especially massage therapists.

Next time, we’ll talk about static grip strength.

Crush Grip Strength:

Any exercise wherein we squeeze a pliable object with our hands can improve our crush grip. You may remember the flimsy spring-loaded grippers of the past when you think of this type of trainer. In fact, the spring loaded grip trainer is an excellent mechanism for training your grip. The issue with many of these trainers is that we quickly become inured to their relatively low resistance, and though doing hundreds of repetitions will build muscular endurance in our hands and forearms, being able to implement greater resistance will allow us to work on increasing our maximum and working strength more efficiently. Luckily, there are grippers today that feature greatly increased spring tension, and they will allow us to go from “granny” grip all the way to “Beowulf” grip levels. The most highly-touted of these grippers is marketed under the name “Captains of Crush” by Ironmind.com. They are heavily built out of spring steel and knurled aluminum, and you’ll be hard pressed to wear them out. There are other, similar grippers out there, but the “Captains” are the gold standard.

Captains of Crush

Maybe metal isn’t your thing, though. Spring grippers are not the only way to go. In fact, for the average person just starting out, they may not even be the best way. If you want to do it yourself, simply find a very hardy cloth like cordura nylon (or leather) and create a pouch that will fill your palm. Now fill the pouch with a pliable substrate like dry beans or very small pebbles. Sew it up, and you have yourself both a hackey sack and a grip trainer.

Okay, if that’s a little too involved, the very beginner can just find one of those “stress balls” or “stress eggs” at the store, and use that until you find that it’s too easy to squeeze steadily, for repetitions, over the course of a minute with each hand. If your hands are either a)weak; b)hurt; or c)very small, this might be the best place to start.

But wait, there’s more. One of my favorite grip tools is one that is shaped like a donut, and available in multiple different levels of challenge. It’s called the Grip Pro Trainer. It’s friendly to the hands, can be used in a variety of different ways, and the three levels are applicable to people anywhere from below normal strength to, well, me! I’d recommend getting all three levels, and I only paid something like $12 for them when I did so. The green is very easy, the black moderate, and the red fairly challenging. They’re great fun, and because they’re soft and non-metallic, you should be able to carry them anywhere without arousing the ire of the Federales.

Grip Pro Trainer

Finally, there’s another metal thing: if you have access to kettlebells, there’s a method for using them that calls for mighty crush grip strength and wrist toughness. If, while doing a kettlebell clean or snatch, we clamp our hand down on the handle and stop the rotation of the weight at its uppermost point, we perform a “bottoms up” clean or snatch. This is hard. Not only does it take great hand and wrist strength, it also takes timing, balance, and coordination. This isn’t a beginner move. That said, you can see what it’s about in the videos section of the website.

Next time, we’ll move on to Pinch Grip Strength!

Considering the great amount of energy and time that we spend thinking about how to condition our bodies, a surprisingly small amount of that goes into the consideration of grip and wrist strength. In fact, the average gym-goer or athlete may have never thought about these types of strength at all. I fell into this camp until a few years ago, when I was introduced to the idea.

This blind spot in our exercise philosophy is intriguing, when you really think about it. Without hands and wrists that are of sufficient strength to allow us to express the strength in the rest of our upper bodies, we are creating a physique that cannot be used to its best advantage. You can’t pick up something you can’t keep a grip on. While the various tools we use in a modern gym are expressly designed to allow us the easiest possible grip on them, such cannot be said of the average object we might have to pick up in daily lift. Your roommate’s couch doesn’t have handy, knurled grips on it, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have to help him move it.

Okay, I’ll get down off the soap box for the moment, and we’ll talk about the various types of hand and wrist strength.

Crush Grip: This is the type of hand strength that we most commonly think of when we imagine a person with great strength. It’s the strength that allows a firm hand shake. It’s one of the most manifest and basic expressions of a hardy, capable person. Simply put, crush grip strength allows us to squeeze whatever we’re holding, creating pressure upon a malleable substance such that it is compressed.

Pinch Grip: Just what it sounds like, this hand strength measure allows us to clamp down on an object, opposing one or more of our fingers with the thumb. Pinch grip is primarily thumb strength, and is one of the least-trained qualities. When grasping and manipulating objects that are too big to get a traditional grip on, this sort of strength can be very beneficial. Within this classification is also fingertip strength–the ability to express the hand’s power through the fingertips, rather than the larger, tougher parts of the finger and palm.

Static Grip: Probably the most easily trained grip, this is the quality that allows us to grasp and hang onto an object that is regular in shape and hard (like a barbell). As the name indicates, the hand is neither closed further or allowed to open, instead simply containing and controlling the load that the object held expresses.

Finger Strength and Toughness: It’s important to remember that the fingers can also be conditioned to open, spread out, and remain straight when load is being expressed upon them. This type of training is primarily done by people in the boxing and martial arts arena, but should be a consideration for anyone who wants their hands to be up to whatever challenge may come.

Wrist Strength: The wrist moves in many directions and orbits, so any consideration of wrist strength will, by its nature, be somewhat involved.

Rotational Strength: The wrist spins on the end of our arm, pronating and supinating. When turning your right wrist clockwise, it is supinating. When turning the same wrist counter clockwise, it is pronating. This sort of strength is important when we’re carrying something that twists in our hands, or when we are trying to express our strength through a tool like a lug wrench or a screwdriver.

“Hammer” Strength: For lack of a better term (I’m sure the exercise scientists have one), the strength that allows us to bend our wrist along the axis of the radius and ulna, as one would do while swinging a hammer upward and down, is an important concern. Again, this strength is valuable when we’re dealing with a dynamic load, where the object we’re contending with can move around and present us with various challenges, moment by moment. Think of doing a pushup while holding a basketball, for instance, and you’ll see the benefit of this strength. Also, any activity where we’re bending something will stress this.

Forearm Strength: While much of the strength that the hands and wrists express is due to the action of the forearm muscles, in this case we are discussing the ability to curl or extend the wrist, as one would do while using the throttle of a motorcycle or wringing out a dish towel. Perhaps the most widely trained type of forearm strength, this one allows us to oppose or create twisting forces.

With the wrist being a complex and highly flexible joint structure, these strength components are highly interrelated, and cannot be considered in a vacuum. The hand/wrist complex works as a unit, and training for one sort of strength tends to have some bleed-over to other types. That said, if we have a weak area, where we cannot express as much strength in a particular vector, our ability to respond to the demands of a shifting, unbalanced, or ungainly load will be diminished.

Next time, I’ll begin going into the various types of training that can be used to improve our hand and wrist strength.

500 pushups within the span of a football game

Ripping phonebooks and apples like a G6.

That is all for now.

• I did 150 crunches without stopping.
• I did 125 pushups last night, for fun. (I did stop a few times.)
• I’ve been doing 50-100 crunches most every night, like I did before I got my gizzard removed.
• I’ve been doing pushup most every night, just to get my body thinking about this sort of thing again.

It’s good. It’s a start. More to come.

As some of you may know, I have been known to write stories that feature the shambling dead. Heck, I’ve actually written a few songs about ‘em that have been set to music and sung (really!). Anyhow, when I saw that my local Sportsman’s Warehouse had zombie-themed targets, I couldn’t resist. I had to pick ‘em up, bring ‘em home, and shoot the stuffing out of ‘em with my bow. I have no predicate to this tale, just thought you might enjoy it.

Cheers,

Patrick