Barbell Shrugged - How To Train Your Grip Strength

Episode Date: March 22, 2017

You ever think about how much you use your hands when you train? Think about it. When you are using a barbell, a kettlebell, the pull up rig, or a pair of rings, your grip strength is playing a huge role in your strength, how long you can perform the movement, and the level of movement capacity you have. More importantly, it is typically the first thing to give out.   In this week's show, we caught up with Andy Galpin and Kenny Kane at CrossFit LA to talk about how you can step up your game when it comes to grip strength. We dive into wrist mobility, gymnastics drills, and why you need to be training your grip in different positions.   Example: the 2015 CrossFit Games Pegboard challenge. Some of the strongest athletes in the world are throwing massive weight overhead, doing gnarly metcons, and performing kipping pullups for days ...but as soon as they are required to turn their hand position 90 degrees, their grip strength goes to shit. You can bet that the games athletes who fell apart in that event are going to be spending some time training their grip strength. You should too, and a great place to start is with this episode.    Enjoy the show, Mike

Right, so it's like, well, I can't improve my aerodyne performance or something. Well, let's look at your hand position. You're out of place, you're leaking 10%. Now we just fix one thing and all of a sudden it gets fixed. Or my shoulder always bothers me when I do this movement. Or why does my neck always hurt when I do these? Well, we can actually fix it because the entire chain is out of position because we haven't started with the right finger placement. We'll be right back. You got to start moving.

Like. All those years of dance finally paid off for this. Totally. We need some physicality to the show. We do. Yeah. We are moving less and less all the time. We've got to move more and more.

It's going to save humanity. Seriously. Yeah. Seriously, 10,000 steps. 60,000. Got to have 60,000. I'm getting mine in now. I think twerking is the answer. I'm getting mine in now.

Twerking is the answer. We need more twerking. Andy, are you a good twerker? No, but look at that. Did you see my post yesterday about Kenny's twerking with the barbell? No. Deadlift twerks. Deadlift twerks. I forget the two guys that were fighting.

What was it recently? Winnie Miller posted it on her Twitter. One guy is like a half guard, and right before the guy taps, he like gives him a few humps. Oh, no. Oh, no. That's not okay. That is really.

You're crossing the line. Yeah. You deserve to get slapped after you tap on that one. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll show you guys that video after this for sure. Maybe we could try it. It's funny because I generally don't miss the Whitney Miller post.

I usually follow those ones pretty closely. Very closely. Welcome to Barbell Strugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson. We have Andy Galpin. Dr. Andy Galpin. Kenny Kane. Dr. Kenny Kane.

Dr. Kenny Kane. Thank you. Coach extraordinary. Doctor of fitness. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I'm getting my 60,000 steps in. Today we're talking about grip strength.

Before, like, trust me, you need this. You need this. Good sell. How many, I mean, we grip things in, like, one dimension, two dimensions maybe. We're looking at bars, right? So mostly gripping bars, especially if you're doing CrossFit and weightlifting. Are you counting bars as one-dimensional since they're just long strings? I'm just making, like, there's more dimensions.

I don't know how dimensions got brought into this. I feel like in Mike's mind there's 75 dimensions. There's at least a dozen that we'll go through today. We grab stuff in pretty uniform ways consistently, and then we weaken ourselves by doing that in prolonged exposures. Is that what you're trying to say? Yeah, if all you do is grip a barbell, then your grip strength probably is not as well-rounded as it needs to be

to do everything you would want to do in a sport like CrossFit or just in daily life. God forbid you're a strongman competitor or something else, just gripping a barbell is probably not all you need to do to get the grip strength that you need to be at your best as an athlete. So we're going to talk about all the variety of different grip strength type training you can do and all the benefits of that type of training today on the show. Yeah, I think a lot of people think they have great grip strength because they can do two or three things really well that involve grip, but when you look back at the

CrossFit Games, the first time they introduced the pegboard, everybody's grip was doing fine for the weekend until they got to the pegboard, and then it fell apart, and a lot of that had simply to do with the fact that the positioning of the hand was different. You know, they rotated 90 degrees and now it's your forearm strength is just blown out. And I think there's two big things in this conversation that are relevant for a lot of different people. Like at that level, people get exposed. exposed, but I think for a general population, like the people that are coming here, just that awareness of where to put pressure on the fingers and on the knuckles as they're grabbing stuff is sometimes missed altogether in the coaching and the basic application. So what I've seen is a lot of sort of injuries through the years without getting any good feedback from the hands. So, yeah. And it's amazing how many positional weaknesses

or performance problems people have simply because of grip strength issues or basic positioning. So it's like, well, I can't improve my aerodyne performance or something. Well, let's look at your hand position. You're out of place. You're leaking 10%. Now we just fix one thing, and all of a sudden it gets fixed. Or my shoulder always bothers me when I do this movement. Or why does my neck always hurt when I do these? Well well we can actually fix it because the entire chain is out of position

because we haven't started with the right finger placement yeah and there's a lot of I got I just been working with steel clubs quite a bit lately and that's very grip intensive but it's it's working my grip and planes that I'm not used to through rotation and then I'm constantly having to change if there's more pressure from my pinky to my index finger and all that kind of stuff. There's a lot of that happening, and it's highlighted where my pee-pee. My pee-pee.

My pee-pee. My grip strength from my pee-pee. The grip is so small. My endurance on the bars is not what it should be. There's no way that we could have made it. Put your hand around your pinky. That's what it should be. There's no way that we could have made it. Put your hand around your pinky. That's what it feels like. So it's been highlighted that the pinky strength might not be there.

And what might help you have better strength on a barbell might be there's so much focus on index finger, middle finger when you're gripping the bar over and over again. And we tend to just monkey the shit out of it. It's like, I'm just going to grab this as hard as I can, and I'm going to lift it. But when you start focusing on your grip and you notice, oh, it's my pinkies are giving out more than anything else, now I improve strength there, now my grip overall gets much, much better, doing very little work to get there.

Yeah, you want to know a quick tell on that exact point. If you're doing, whether it's a pull-up or any... It's the same thing, right? Whether the bar's over your head or it's below you. If you see the pinky dangling, problem sign, right? It immediately puts your wrist into a different position, right? Because I don't have to hold it here. I let it go there.

I can slide into a different position now, which immediately changed the angle at my wrist, right? Medial to lateral. And now I've also lost a certain percentage of my grip. So you can tell that immediately, and the movement almost doesn't matter, but you're going to lose productivity there, which is why if you then take a person. It'll change the movement. Yeah, and it changes.

It can change muscle use as well, right? So that's like one of the easiest and quickest ways to get somebody to learn to use their lats during any kind of pulling is say, okay, make sure you're pulling hard with your pinky. Oftentimes that's going to cause the rotation of the shoulder and cause the lats to go in, or at least it will help them, oh, I see what that feels like now because I'm not sure I think my lat's on or it's not on. Well, when the pinky comes involved, it's not a guarantee,

but it can be a very nice cue or something you can try for somebody who's having a hard time understanding that position. To take that a little further, like on a kettlebell swing is a very simple variation. And one of the things that I've noticed with like Gen Pop is that there's a lot of... Who's Gen Pop? The general population. So not like elite fitnessers, but... I thought it was some chick, you know.

Prison terms. Gen Pop, new fish. I've been to the yard. So one of the cues that we've been working with very basically is, to your point, Andy, driving the pinky knuckle into the outside of the kettlebell. And immediately what that does is that fixes people anatomically, and the lat's cued, so there's just immediately more stability through the spine. So that's a very transferable thing.

And then, of course, when you get to more complex movements, like cleans or snatches or something like that, it's very applicable. And then, of course, up on the pull-up bar, which I know we're going to get into. You can take us there. I don't mind. Well, it's funny. I mean, we've been open 14 years, and we've been letting people sort of index and knuckle their kettlebell swings, and now we're starting to orient just driving the pinky into the outside of the kettlebell,

and it's just a very simple movement changes the rest of the kinetic change instantaneously. I like that cue because I've been practicing external rotation with the kettlebell, trying to split it. But I think that's a much more subtle way of approaching it that's going to connect all the way to the kettlebell. A lot of times I'm thinking about what's happening at the shoulders. And if I can think of something at the pinkies, that's a much more subtle way of going about it.

I think that probably is better. It's huge. We're seeing in gen gen pop again there's like there's mobility issues there's thoracic issues there's kyphosis there's a lot of like things that you want to be able to fix in people but you're seeing them two or three hours a week in a class and that's very very difficult so the coaching has to be more succinct and and sometimes just moving just the art of moving will fix those things very helpful here yeah when we were talking with with julian we did a couple episodes with him a year or two ago.

He was talking about how a lot of times people's forearm flexors in particular, where they all attach on the medial upper part of the elbow, and they cause you to flex your wrist this way. Since the thumb is the weak link as far as your grip goes, it's just putting pressure here, you're going to be able to withstand a lot less than putting a lot of pressure against all four fingers and the rest of your hand. So when you're gripping, whether you're doing a pull-up, being able to be here just a little bit with the hand slightly over the bar, where all the pressure is going into the hand versus breaking at the wrist.

And now it's just the fingers and especially the thumb, it becomes the limiter. So if you have stronger grip strength and then stronger forearm muscles, since it's all tied together it's all part piece of the same system being able to keep that that slightly flexed positioning just gonna it's gonna make it where you can do more pull-ups before you get fatigued same thing with farmer's walks like he was saying when you walk with a little bit of of that that wrist flexion then it's easier to do a farmer's walk for a long time once you get that once your wrist falls straight or or even kind of breaks to the outside a little bit and the thumb just can't hang on to the same amount of weight for the same period of time. So you're not going to be able to perform as well. Adding to that, having worked with Julian last year,

one of the things that really came up for me is putting people on pull-up bars and trying to execute that hand position. And immediately what we're seeing is people's shoulder stability increases multiple. Like it fixes a lot of things in the primary joints. Super helpful. You get better shoulder stability. Better shoulder stability. If you have good wrist position.

Yeah. Do you remember? Which you can't get if you don't have good forearms. Exactly. Do you remember how Tommy Kono used to teach how to do the hook grip? Used to tell us to wrap one finger at a time. Yeah.

So you start with your fingers, your pointer finger and your thumb, and you spread them out as wide as you possibly can, and then drive the wedge in between your fingers into the bar and let that pressure wrap your hands, and then go from the first, so the pointer and the thumb, and you wrap all the way around, but you end with the pinky. So the pinky was key to connecting the final loop there. So you start there, and then that hand is set.

Then you walk over, set the other hand, and get it locked in. So you don't re-grip, and you get down there the whole time. So you stand directly over the bar, push down one, wrap all the way around, finish with the pinky, set that, walk over, set the other one, and now you're ready to go. Well, what's interesting about that is I was just with Kelly Starrett at CrossFit San Francisco, and he's teaching a similar thing because Tommy would say do that, but before you lift,

you need to get in that same wrist flexed position. So we should start your pull slightly flexed and not extended, which is the same position you just talked about and Kelly was talking about when he was teaching his people how to do the pull-ups, which is the knuckle is on top of the bar. And when it slides off of the bar, we get to here, which very quickly devolves into there, which is now your seconds away from being done.

So it's the same position, but the problem when you try to hook grip like that when you're weightlifting is if you don't have the forearm strength, you break immediately. So the first thing that moves off the floor is actually your hand extending, and now you've actually lost a little bit of the tension there. Yeah. Tommy Kona, for those that don't know who he is, he was an Olympic champion in weightlifting and a Mr. Universe at one point. He's at the same year, the same year. Yeah. This was back like in the 50s. I want to say something like that. He's older now. Yeah. Like he did one thing one time.

Yeah. Like Olympian multiple times, multiple weight classes. He's the most decorated American weightlifter ever. Yeah. Like, you know, internationally. He just died, actually, I think. I believe he did. Yeah, his book's great, though. I remember his book as well.

He was talking about he doesn't use hook grip when warming up. And so, which is counter to probably what a lot of people are doing, is once they learn hook grip, they're hook gripping their steering wheel when they're driving around town. But like, you know, one of the things that he noted in his book is, you know, work up to 60% no hook grip to make your grip stronger on a training day. You probably don't want to do that on a day

that you're competing, but you know, just little things like that, just, you know, taking making it a little bit more difficult or changing things up, more variety can be a really good thing uh for the record yet his book is rarely referenced like i don't hear people talk about it that often but it's a very good book look up tommy cono's olympic weightlifting book and go buy it because it's really good for sure and it's just he couldn't walk you through like

start to finish the whole thing like it's very very easy easy to use. And to your point about hook gripping, Tommy Okono used to recommend that you don't do a hook grip through almost any of your training unless you absolutely have to once you're at 95% or 100%, or it's late in the training session and you're missing specifically because of your grip. But I think one of the arguments he makes, and maybe I'm putting words in his mouth a little bit,

is that if you train all the time without using the hook grip, then you don't need to use the hook grip. And then when you go to competition, then using the hook grip, assuming you've practiced it enough to where you're comfortable with it and all that, it becomes extra easy to lift the weights that you're normally lifting because now you have a much more solid grip, the whole reason people use a hook grip in the first place. Yeah, honestly, it's the exact same argument for using straps.

I mean, that's literally the same thing. So should you use straps? Should you not use straps? Well, that's all he's doing, right, is saying the same thing. Well, here's your time to use. It's not about should I or should I not. It's about when to and when not to. And we have to identify, like, what's the point of the training session?

Am I in competition? Am I not in competition? Am I trying to work grip strength? Am I trying to maximize my pull? That gives you your answer right there, whether or not you add the aid of the strap or the thumb, whatever happens. That's a good point because I get hit up on Twitter, and people are like, are wraps good?

I'm like, depends. Yeah, they're not good or bad. There's no such thing as that. If the stability isn't there to hold the positions, then the whole thing is going to fall down. What are some good tests to know if somebody, if someone's listening now, and what can they do to test to say, hey, my grip strength is good or not?

We were talking about this earlier. We like, I like the concept of just accumulating time while on a full hang. So just you're hanging on a pull up bar, and can you hold it for 30 seconds or a minute? Or if you're hearing that, and you're like, well, 30 seconds 30 seconds or a minute like who can't do that then then you probably want to move on to hanging single arm how long can you hang one arm at a time on a pull-up bar and then if that's the case compare right and left sides like can you do 20 seconds on one arm and only

five seconds on the other arm you know that that's a problem like it might not be a grip strength issue specifically there could be be other factors there, but having some sense of balance between right and left sides is really important, not just grip strength but with most aspects of training. But accumulating time on a barbell, or sorry, a bar, like a pull-up bar, I think is an easy way to see how good your grip strength really is. And what if somebody's like, man, I can do like five seconds hanging, but I want to do something. Maybe you go back and use something like one of these rings.

Because now you can actually go from, instead of being in this double overhand or what we would call pronated position, you can actually go to neutral, which is a much stronger position for you. It turns the shoulder into their external rotation. Lats go on. And you can actually hang there.

So if you're having a hard time or if you're like, okay, I can hang, but instead of like 1,000, 1,000, drop, maybe do that same thing and work up to a minute on the rings until you can progress to the bar. Sure. One of the things we have people do around here is just hold on to a rope, double hand, and then just elevate their knees. And so we'll go back and forth between the bar and the rope just to develop

because a lot of people want to get to pull-ups. They want to get to rope climbs and all that kind of stuff but but the thing that is broken first in the chain is the hands and the grip strength so that's it and those are great indicators as well i mean before sending anybody up on a rope we'll just see if they can hold on to the rope and then elevate their knees to 90 degrees and then extend their feet for 10 to 15 seconds. And that's usually a basic test. Like, do you have the strength to hold on to the bar or hold on to the rope as you ascend it, assuming that you're going to be able to ascend it?

That's a solid test. I don't know how many times I've watched somebody get to the top of a 15-foot rope climb because they were able to use their feet, and when it's time to come down, they shred their hands. Oh, yeah. It's like, well, how do you match this prerequisite of grip strength? This probably would not have been a problem. Right. For the record, around here, for those that are listening

and or just don't know where we are, we're at Kenny Kane's gym, CrossFit LA, right now. One of the very first CrossFit gyms ever. Opened in 2004, yeah. So we've made a lot of mistakes around this stuff. And, again, our population, we've made a lot of mistakes around this stuff so and again our population we're like everyday sort of people so we're not like crossfit games type or elite exercisers in any way it's just it's meant to be you know what crossfit was originally intended

like keeping high functionality in life and having that crossover to have transferable skills yeah and and to me that's important like these basic, like we bypass a lot of that awareness. Like the mistake that we made at this gym is not teaching people how the relationship of bars, kettlebells, dumbbells in the hands and how that relates to the shoulders. And just what you were talking about earlier, all conversations that julian and and kelly have pointed out um like if you change that position you can feel your pecs turn on you can feel your lats turn on and that's something that we simply didn't even teach in the awareness of our participants like we're guilty of like having people you know create poor movement patterns without actually going hey how does this feel are you aware of like having people, you know, create poor movement patterns without actually going, hey, how does this feel?

Are you aware of like, oh, wow, when you internally rotate, the pec kind of turns on. And, oh, by the way, is the thumb and index finger helping to orient that. Conversely, if you're driving the pinky, as we talked about earlier, into the weighted object, like that's going to turn on the lats. And that relates to all these pulling and gripping things and all these different planes of motion which to me is like that was a huge thing that awareness piece is what we missed and now we're starting to go back and correct that and teach people to be

in their bodies with a higher level of consciousness and just using the feet and in this particular episode like using the hands to connect to the shoulders and then therefore the rest of the body, which is huge. I mean, that's the transferability like of skills. That's what we talk about, but it's like,

we don't simplify it enough for the people doing our thing. Yeah. And for the bros out there, pinky muscles, chicks, dig lats, chicks, dig.

That's all you got to know. We're going to take a break. Yeah. When we come back, we're going to get into the, all the varieties of, of the're going to take a break. Your muscles are sexy. Yeah, when we come back, we're going to get into all the varieties of the ways of training these guys. These are the Boba Shrug standards. Yeah.

Yep, yep. And we're back talking about grip strength. And if your grippers are stronger. Grippers. Grippers. You'll live longer. Is that true, Andy? Yeah, it's very true. We're going to have to ask the scientists in the room. if your grippers are stronger grippers you'll live longer is that true Andy? yeah it's very true we're going to have to ask the scientists in the room

a really cool study now that you've called me a scientist now I have to say something say sciencey be sciencey has to be accurate interesting study came out showing grip strength

being a very significant predictor to mortality and so it's nice because it adds to the list of we've known leg strength to be super important, VO2 max, total amount of lean body mass, and now we can add this one to our list. And it was really cool, but people were like, well, how in the hell is actually having or why is having good strong grip actually make me live longer? You guys have any idea why that would make you live longer? I wouldn't imagine it's actually the grip strength specifically. Grip strength is just a highly correlated grip strength

with many other physical benefits that you could have from being strong and just active. It's a straight correlate, man. Probably an easy thing to measure, too. You walk into a doctor's office and it's like, boom, here you go. So it came up significant because they tested it. So it's not to say that, like, oh, snatching isn't significant. Well, that's not what they tested, though.

Right. So they included it because it's very practical. Grandma, pick up the bar. Long live the snatchers. Right. And for GP. Anyone can do it. Right.

It's very, very high correlate to general other practices of strength. But the really interesting part is the training of it has even probably more of an effect than the actual strength itself what i mean by that is there are hundreds of studies now well at least dozens that have looked at grip strength grip training specifically and shown how that has decreased blood pressure it's again we're talking in general population people and so gen pop yeah that gen pop thing. You got it. You're welcome, guys.

You're welcome. The next question then, of course, is like, well, why is actually grip strength training? So what this generally looks like, the prescription, is you do something where it could be as simple as grabbing one of those grip strength trainer things, you know, the little clips, and squeezing as hard as you can for five or six seconds, doing that three or four or five times, doing that two or three times a day, and after four weeks, you can see dramatic decreases in resting blood pressure, systolic and diastolic. It doesn't take much is the point. Like, just get doing this a little bit, especially if you're not doing a lot of work.

And the reason why it's actually working is pretty cool, and I've got to give a shout-out to my students, Sarah, Nicole, and Josh. They just gave a presentation this last week on this, and I learned something that I had never learned, which is actually how this whole research line got started. It was a fighter pilot guy. So they were working with pilots, and they were trying to figure out why they kept passing out.

Or, well, they knew why because of all the high G-forces. And what he started to realize was the guys that were gripping the the steering wheel like what do you call it on a plane the controls the controls i guess the stick the airplane handlebar the ones that were gripping it really hard right we're not passing out as much right and so he's like well that's really interesting and then he started to figure out okay what's actually happening is when they grip it really hard they maintain blood pressure better so they don't pass out i wonder if there's any clinical applications to this so then they started doing clinical trials

where they actually train grip strength and then they started noticing holy shit your blood pressure goes down i gotta say that's a little bit counterintuitive because when I think of somebody who's just gripping stuff, I think of a very stressed person who would organically have a very, I mean, I'm so stressed, I can't unclutch my teeth. That's why it works. It's the release. No, it's the same thing. Oh, fuck, I was wrong.

So, in other words, if your hamstrings are too weak, what do you do? You overload them with something, right? You put them in a position where you exacerbate or exaggerate the weakness. The same thing is happening with your blood pressure. You have high blood pressure. I exasperate it. You have to then adapt, and then it comes back down. That's why it actually works that way.

Cool. Earlier we talked. We didn't really go through the the whole uh standards process that i kind of attended to at the time i mentioned it and then we got off it we're talking about hanging from a bar as a standard for um for grip strength and how long you can do it is how you can how you can measure yourself against other people so i said 30 seconds to a minute it's kind of offhandedly but that's not actually what the what i believe the standards should be 30 seconds is pretty light.

I'd say one minute would be like the minimum, and then two minutes would probably be the standard for you're pretty strong. And then the other thing that I rather forgot to mention was farmer's walks. Yeah, we didn't forget anything. It was all you. Yes. I forgot it. It was all me. Mike is always on task.

Way to take personal responsibility. Mike on task. I have extreme ownership. Great book. So, yeah, farmer's walk. The standard for farmer's walk, if you can have body weight per hand and walk for 50 feet, that's pretty good. Body weight and a half for 50 feet is pretty dang strong. So you can test that out.

You mean total weight or per side? Per side. So body weight. If you're a 200-pound guy, then 200 pounds per hand for 50 feet is really, really, really good. How do you do that? How would you actually put 200 pounds? Just farmer's handles. Yeah, or if you don't have that, just a barbell.

Just load a barbell up with 200 pounds. Or if you don't have that, you can use your children and use the back of their shirt. Got big kids, childhood obesity? Thank you, Kenny. 200 pound kid. Handling it all. Well, for you, that's like 65 pounds, so you're fine. You could do a barbell. A barbell would be pretty tough

because there's going to be a lot of swaying front to back with the barbells. That's not just holding it. That's like controlling the sway as you walk with a barbell. Farmer's handle makes it a lot easier. But those are pretty high standards. If you're a 200-pound guy and you've got 400 pounds total,

200 pounds per side, and you walk that 50 feet, that's pretty dang strong as it is. If you can do body weight in half, that's ridiculously strong. Most people can't even pick that up. That's a much higher standard than the pull-up bar, a minute or two. So we have standards. You can test yourself. You can just hang from a bar, see if you can make it to a minute you can do the farmer's carry just

to see where you're at uh and then the other thing with the with the hanging from the bar i know in gymnastics a lot of times it's a standard just to get your chin over the bar for a whole minute so that's grip plus plus more wow so if you're if you're knocking out a bunch of kipping pull-ups and trying to like kip into your muscle upsups and you don't quite have that one minute chin over bar hold might be worth looking at one thing that I'd like to add too is that almost everybody's going to have a

pretty big distinction between their ability to hold themselves under a bar right versus left and to pay attention to that out the gate yeah because the more you train the bigger that gap could get. Especially if you're doing something that's bilateral, which is most of the training done in the functional fitness world.

Yes, we have these standards and ways you can test. What are some different ways? What are the different types of grip strength, and how do we test them or train them, actually? I mean, we start with the basics. There's basically just closing around a standard barbell size. Beyond that, you could go really easy and just lift with fat grips or something that just makes

the grip a little bit bigger. You could do bent rows, like one arm rows with the barbell slid into a landmine or something like that, where you're grabbing the sleeve of the bar. So your grip's just not quite closed all the the way it's more of an open grip or at least depending on how big your hands are you might be able to touch your your finger to the end of your of your thumb but it just it's much a much larger grip to grab onto um practically you know for for someone like me i've done a lot of wrestling i've done a lot of jujitsu mma you know

we're always grabbing someone's wrist or behind their, behind their head. So grabbing wrists and wrestling is right about the size of the sleeve of a bar. And so I've done a lot of that just to get that, that very specific diameter, um, gripping in the weight room that I, that I also need to use in my actual sport. We talked about different ways to do pull-ups too, in terms of, instead of just grabbing the bar the same way every time, using a towel. So wrapping a towel around and doing your pull-up with the two towels. Talk about change of movement. My gosh, that's way more difficult.

Or even, like Doug used to do this a lot, going with the neutral grip on the bar. So imagine you're standing in front of the bar like a normal pull-up. You actually swing one of the hands around so that your hands, your right and left hand are facing each other. And as you do the pull up, you have to kind of pull your head to the right side or then pull your head to the left side as you move. And it is a different type of pull up and it is a different grip challenge entirely. Or going the one handed grip pull. What other stuff that?

One ancillary one would be to if you have a stretch rope to throw a stretch rope over a pull-up bar and just hang on that. And if you can start initiating a pull-up as well, the interesting thing about that is because it's sort of an unstable environment, you're going to naturally find yourself into that wrist flex position that we were talking about at the beginning of the show without actually thinking about it that much, because it's very hard to hold onto a skinny rope. Immediately, you're going to go into some sort of wrist extension and then it's going to go through um sort of your weaker fingers you're going to find yourself falling off so natasha and i've been doing that too but with the carries so you take the two bands wrap them

around a kettlebell or a dumbbell and you do your farmer's carries with the bands on top of that and so you add the stability in as well, and it changes the grip strength entirely. And it keeps people, like, aware and on their toes a little bit. So you're not getting so detail-oriented. I mean, one of the things, one of my faults as a coach is I can bore the hell out of people. So I'm like, this is fun. And then people are like, we're paying. This is boring.

And so there's a distinction as a coach and as an owner where you've got to be like, okay, how do we keep that compelling? So I find that really, really useful. The degree of challenge just keeps people engaged and wanting to kind of figure that out. We were talking about, too, the difference between doing all of your pulling pronated or supinated. Yep. So you were saying something about when you were a kid. Well, yeah, I started training when I was 15, and from 15 to 24, it you know more bodybuilding type type training which means

that i'm doing all sorts of like i'll have an entire pool day and i'm gonna pull in in as many different directions as possible you mean neutral grip pronated grip right yeah my hands are all over the place i'm pulling from up they're everywhere i have slept with you i know exactly how your hands go handsy yeah just handsy. Yeah. Just a little. So, and then I cruise right over that comment. And then I got... YouTube comments. He said, what?

And then I got into weightlifting and then CrossFit. And sleepovers. And sleepovers with Andy. And then there was about eight years where... Andy, it's 3 a.m. Let's test our grip strength. You know what? I think that's contagious because now I do that too at night.

And I'm like, I blame it all on you. I never did that in my life until you. You learned it. Now I just can't keep my hands off things. You're talking about sleeping together and he's contagious. Wow. So where were we? Supinated, pronated. Oh's contagious. Wow. So where were we? Supinated, pronated.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, after eight years of weightlifting and CrossFit, I'm like, shit. You know, I wake up one day, my right lat doesn't fire as well as my left lat. And, you know, things just aren't the way they used to be. And it's a little bit painful. Yeah. And then I realized after talking to some people,

Julian Pinault was enlightening on some of this. He was just like, oh, I have been neglecting supinated grip and neutral grip a lot for eight years. That's a long fucking time. So I almost do – I'd say maybe 20% of my training is that pronated, you know, hand over training out, but the other 80% is some variation to keep it all healthy. So if you've ever done bent row, most of the time you go to go into a pronated grip,

the two hand over, the same pull up, deadlift, all these things. When you do that way versus when you switch and go into the supinated grip, it changes the pull considerably. So it's just a simple variation you can make. You can notice in the musculature in the forearm and the bicep and the shoulder, you can start feeling how things are actually working. It's difficult at first. Or it may even be painful.

I know a lot of times people, you know, they start flipping that hand over and all of a sudden the elbow pain, I'm like. And if that's the case, my recommendation is do static holds. So don't try to, like, work through it with movement. Do some static holds. You may notice you get achy elbows or shoulders, and that will dissipate over time. Right.

Also, because people don't do the static holds and they don't do bent rows with a supinated grip often enough, they go from doing all pronated grip, palms away, kipping pull-ups, and all the other pronated work that we do, and then all of a sudden one day they're like, okay, I have 20 rope climbs today. And so then all of a sudden it's super high volume on one day where it's all essentially supinated grip, where as you're on the pull-up, your palm is facing towards you, you're extremely, externally rotated, your elbow is in, and a lot of people, they don't have that grade of conditioning in that position.

Oh, yeah. And so they don't get very good lat activation in that position. The lats get tired really, really quick. Their biceps blow up. They get medial elbow pain. And if your bicep is trying to do the whole thing, they're overworking, which is why they're blowing up. If you don't feel a strong contraction in your lat,

and you're trying to do all the majority of the work with the surrounding musculature of the shoulder that pulls it into extension, but not the lat specifically, since the lat is basically like the glute of the upper body. Like it's the biggest, strongest, most dominant muscle of your upper body. And if you're not using it, it'd be like not using your glutes when you're squatting. Like you're going to not be able to, to perform at your best because you're missing out on a very large chunk of muscle mass and then their biceps blow up and they get elbow pain etc so you don't want to just jump straight into doing high volume rope climbs you want to have some conditioning prior to that if you've been doing rope climbs for a long time you don't have any problems that's great but

if if you are still learning how to do rope climbs and or you just don't do rope climbs very often and that's something you're trying to work into your training it'd be a very wise decision to to do some um some supinated pulling work whether it, whether it's bent rows or even, you could, of course, could just scale rope climbs a couple times before you jump into full rope climbs. But anyway, you don't want to just jump into high-volume supinated work with rope climbs or you will destroy something. Yeah.

Another thing that I learned when I was studying gymnastics is going from, this was something I got from Coach – was it Sommer? Sommer. Sommer. Anyways, like the progression that he has is you do the chin over bar hold, and then you might do some strict pull-ups. I'm not quite sure on that. Ring rows.

But before muscle-ups, so a lot of times people go from pull-ups to muscle-ups, and during a muscle-up, especially in rings, guess what? Yeah. You're rotating your hands all over the place. You might start pronated and then end up in a neutral grip and so on and so forth, and one of the things in that progression that really helped me out was the rope climbs and especially getting good at rope climbs that are, that are, um, you know, legless, or even if you have to use your legs, you're getting that grip.

You're having to turn that wrist and really get strong and activate the lat like what you're talking about, Doug. And, uh, when I started working much more rope climbs, my muscle ups became easy. It's like all my, I was like, oh, the grip was just there. So many people, you know, I think it's think if you've been watching or listening to the show long enough, we've shown you that doing more of the same is not going to get you the results you want a lot of times. And so doing the rope stuff is going to translate to muscle-ups. But I think working on rope climbs, getting to where I could do 10 legless rope climbs,

after that, muscle-ups, like I didn't even need to train muscle-ups. I just wanted to train muscle ups. I just wanted to train the rope climb to get better at the muscle ups. I like having the rope as a condition to set yourself. If you're going to do like a rope pull up, say you sit on the ground, you're

in a straddle position, you're going to do like straddle pull ups on the rope. And you can just wrap both your hands around, even extra far if you need to. Make sure you have that bit of flexion at the wrist. Then you can just pull straight to your sternum and that's very similar to having a false grip and pulling yourself to a muscle position but you're just drilling it on the rope another another quick point about muscle up since i just brought that up was muscle ups aren't necessarily

all about grip strength specifically and a lot of people that they can't get muscle ups because they can't maintain that false gripping and they especially can't do a strict muscle up because they can't maintain the false grip and then i watch them do it and it has less to do in my mind with with their position of of their wrist on on the ring where because they don't have adequate mobility at the wrist if you're if you're watching the video right now like this is a roughly 90 degree bend at my wrist as I'm flexing, so I can just hang on the ring. But if I don't have full mobility at my wrist and there's an angle here, then the ring's going to slide, and I'm going to slide out of that muscle-up. It would be very similar to doing an overhead squat and not having a vertical arm.

Like if I'm doing an overhead squat and I have a vertical arm here, I'm going to be able to hold a lot of weight overhead. But if the second I make it where my arm is not vertical, then I'm only going to be able to lift a fraction of the weight as an overhead squat compared to having a vertical arm. So if I put my arm out in front of me, the bar's out in front of me, then I'm trying to pull and hold all this weight up rather than stacking it on my, you know, over my bones. I'm only gonna be able to lift like 20%. So same thing with the muscle up. If you can't bend your wrist all the

way, then you're going to slide out of the muscle up. Not because you don't have good grip strength, it's because you're out of position because you lack the mobility to get into the right position. So if you can't dodge a ball, you can't dodge a wrench. That's right. So, so helpful um can you actually just for the sake of maybe some of the viewers what is the false grip what do you mean by that like what um what's it look like basic false grip you know you're you're bending at the wrist to basically have your wrist start on top of the ring that way when you're doing a muscle up or something like that you can

rotate and actually be on top of the ring if you're just holding the ring in your hand again if you're watching the video if you just hold the ring in your hand it's hard to to be on top of the ring. If you're just holding the ring in your hand, again, if you're watching the video, if you're just holding the ring in your hand, it's hard to rotate on top of the ring because your whole wrist has to rotate over the top of the ring. If you're in a false grip, your wrist is already over the ring, and then you're just rotating over it

without actually having to jump as far, so to speak. This would be akin to also a thumb over position. If you're doing a pull-up, other than, as opposed to having your thumb underneath the bar where you're holding the bar with your hand like you're holding an upside-down dumbbell, now your thumb is over top and on top of the barbell,

which is what changes the pull and changes the position quite a bit. It's going to allow you to maybe hang a lot longer. Like if you're trying to do your hang and if your thumb is on top of the bar, that's very different than when your thumb is below the bar and holding it and it changes it entirely. So it's something you want to be very cognizant of when you're watching because that really has implications a lot of the times for helping people

externally rotate, set the shoulder blade, set the shoulder joint, and not get into bad positions where it's killing their shoulder. A couple things. I was just distracted by watching your hands and noticing just how small they are. Oh! He had to take a shot. It's an unintentional shot,

but I've just been mesmerized by your hands. And then the secondary part of that is that I realized that one time you used to lift a lot of weight from the ground and propel it up into the air. That's really impressive given that you had a man's bar. My thumb grip is about that far. That's really impressive. I used to take my thumb way out to here so I could actually.

Make you feel better, Andy. Yeah, see? Fuck you, Kenny. It's not that much different. Mine is barely bigger. But for me, I wish. Oh, Kenny. It's not that much different. Mine is barely bigger. I'm sorry. But for me, I wasn't like – Oh, Hunter's got man hands.

Yeah, I wasn't a world class – That actually is a very good point. We talked about being able to hang from a bar for a period of time, be able to do really heavy farmer's walks. I mean, the standard I set for really, really, really strong, body weight in half, that's 300 pounds. If you're a 200-pound guy, per arm is 600 pounds. I mean, most people can't pick it up off the ground let alone walk with it that's a really really

really really really heavy farmer's walk if you have small hands you're probably gonna be able to do that right even if you are really strong like if you have really big hands then that's going to be so so much then we get a pinch grip i've definitely noticed that in competitions like crossfit competitions stuff like that you're going against guys that have, like, the banana hands. Yeah, Tony Robbins' hands, dude. Yeah, man. It's the banana hands. But you see these guys, like, they can hang on to a bar longer. The barbell's not as intensive.

I mean, I remember just if I'm carrying something, like my forearms used to be a lot bigger and my grip was strong unless I was holding something of large diameter. There was a direct linear relationship between my snatch 100 max and my grip strength. Really? Yeah. My snatch was 100% limited by my grip strength. Absolutely.

Not even close. Actually, so we're talking about hook grip, and then alternating grip is another one that we could bring up where you're pronated in one hand, supinated in the other. That way, when the bar rolls out of one, it rolls into the other. Similarly with the hook grip and then alternating grip is another one that we could bring up where you're pronated in one hand, supinated in the other. That way when the bar rolls out of one, it rolls into the other. Similar with the hook grip.

Oh my God, is that why it works so well? Similar with the hook grip. The bar, if you have a nice, like a Laco barbell, has a really good spin. If you have a hook grip, then it's the same thing. As it rolls out of your fingers, rolls into your thumb and vice versa. And so even though the bar is very spinny,

you're not gonna pull off the bar. If you to do a heavy clean pull with without a hook grip with a really nice bar it's really easy to like just lose your grip and the bar would just spin right out of your hand do you remember when chris moore did that yeah we we got chris to do a clean i have a video of it yeah i think i posted it a couple years ago he could repost it but he tried to do it like 2007 yeah and he tried to to do a clean just like he deadlifted and he went boom and he just threw the barbell so far in front of him and i thought i was gonna die he almost hit the wall behind him yeah it was awesome yeah because he was just like yeah so so i'm i'm brainstorming a standard in my

head as i'm talking about this but in in your mind, if you can do a deadlift either with straps or an alternating grip and you pull 500 pounds, what is the percentage of that lifting that you think doing a double overhand, no hook grip lift should be? 85% of your max? Yeah, I would say. With a regular grip? Yeah, I would think so. Something there.

I was thinking like 80, 85. Yeah. That sounds good. Interesting. Yeah. What do you think? If you've got a major difference or you've got a problem. I would think so. Something there. I was thinking like 80, 85. Yeah. That sounds good. Interesting. Yeah. What do you think? If you've got a major difference or you've got a problem. I'll say this.

If you can only do 300 pounds, then something is wrong. I would say I'm probably at 80% on that. Yeah. I would feel comfortable. Me too. I feel like I'd be about 80. Let's go. We should go test that.

We should test that. We'll test that. Don't hold us to it, though. Yeah. One thing I did want to add, though. Pay attention to social media. We might post something. I get this question a lot.

I know you have. I can't do it for a while. I just had thumb surgery. Why'd you have thumb? Oh, yeah, that's right. You just tore your thumb to half. We just gripped. Yeah.

I can't grip yet. It's doing pretty well, though. You don't want to tell everybody what happened? Check that out. I just dislocated my thumb at jiu-jitsu and popped my radial collateral and tore the joint caps and all that, so I had to have it repaired. Yeah. So I can't grip super strong quite yet.

So you guys will have to try around that. You might need to listen to this episode. In the car on the way home. I'll play it back. The one thing that people ask about is, okay, if I do the over-under or the alternating grip when I deadlift, is it important that I switch my grip? Should I use the same grip every time?

Should I switch? I think it's a good idea to switch. Why? I feel like over time, even though – I've got an answer too. Go ahead. Well, I feel like we've been answering this for a long time on the show. Sure.

I mean – Yeah. We have? Just tell us about it. Well, no, no, no. I mean to the point that like balance is one of the things. So switching would be, to me, the obvious answer. I was hoping maybe for more.

I don't think you want to intentionally create an imbalance if you have the opportunity not to. So, yeah, alternating your grip I think is a very good idea. Well, I was actually – so what I was probing you for there is maybe you being the super smart anatomy guy, how is it actually different on the one side? Other than my other hand's right here and there, what's the problem going to be or why is it actually that different so if

you're if you're supinated on one side and pronated on the other uh it's more likely in my opinion that you will on the pronated side especially if you're tired or out of position you'll start you could either start to with your spine rotate that way a little bit that can happen and and or destabilize your shoulder by rotating it forward just a little bit that can happen and and or destabilize your shoulder by rotating it forward just a little bit when you're when you're externally rotated you're going to be more likely to set that that shoulder kind of down and back posteriorly tilted at the scapula and then shoulder your shoulder joint glenohumeral joint would be more likely to be kind of set and centrated in the socket it's very hard to do a deadlift in a supinated grip and have an internally rotated shoulder.

Yes. It's going to be very, very difficult. Yeah. So if you switch them, you're going to almost guarantee that half the time or whatever percentage you're doing it, at least one of the shoulders is in the right position. And that's the same reason I like to have someone do supinated grip pull-ups before they're doing the pronated.

Right. It's good. It's good for the lats. It's good for the lats it's good for everybody cool uh so we talked we talked about having uh you know regular grip on a bar large grip we talked about towel pull-ups false grip we talked a little bit about hook grip even though we didn't go into a lot of details hook grip has many benefits but we're not really training hook grip other than just you know part of your normal weight lifting training alternating grip

can be useful but again to your point earlier about hook grip i don't think you should alternate grip until you absolutely have to like double overhand pronated grip i think is is best until you get to a weight you know above 80 90 percent where you actually have to use the what about double supinated double supinated that's where it's at. I really never tried it, actually. That's something I haven't really ever dabbled in. There's no reason you can't do it. I've done a lot of rows that way, but I haven't necessarily done deadlifts that way. Even bench press like that,

but doing a reverse grip bench press, there's some benefits there, too, but I've never done it with deadlifts at all. I've tried it with people that round a lot, and I've elevated the bar bar and then had them supinate just to get a good back position.

That's a great way to limit somebody on weight who is not smart enough to recognize they should go down and wait. If you're rounding your back, the weight might not be great. Now let's purposely make your grip the limiter and set your shoulders

in a better position naturally uh one of the things uh we went and visited christmas abbott a few years ago and i did a group workout and it was a pause at the top six second pause at the top for deadlifts so it's like oh yeah it was a it was a five second hold at the top. It was a set of, I think it was a six-second hold at the top, five deadlifts, and it was touch and go. So the pause was at the top. So you hold for, and then you just kind of like go down with the tempo, touch and go. So no pause at the bottom.

And I was really surprised. It's a great drill. What was interesting is, especially during, when I was going down, I noticed that it was really easy to maintain good technique for my deadlift position during because you're on yeah during the negative and then I was just touching and going back to the top and I recognize that as a highly therapeutic way of training deadlifts just for positions and then also grip strength one more point that you from the question you asked me earlier is that for the

supinated hand so the hand that's palm forward when you're doing heavy deadlifts that that side bicep is going to be taking a lot more stress than the other side bicep so whenever someone gets a bicep tear when they when they're doing deadlifts which is a relatively common injuries as far as injuries go in in sport powerlifting as an example you know tearing your bicep off of your radius on your on your supinated side would be way more common than on the other side. And so sparing your biceps by alternating your grip, so not alternating your grip where one is supinated and one is pronated,

but actually switching where the other one is supinated and the other one is pronated where you actually switch every once in a while, I think would be very healthy for your biceps in the long term. Yeah, it's actually a good way to train your biceps. So sometimes we think the idea that the bicep has no function. Well, again, try to pull without it. Like it shouldn't be the primary mover. Absolutely not.

We're looking for the bigger lat, right? But that's one good way. That's actually one of the reasons why I like doing the double hands, palms up, or the supinated grip bent row is you will learn very very very quickly oh my gosh my biceps don't work maybe those are what are actually limiting my rope climb or whatever right so they could be blowing up because i'm overusing them or they could be blowing up because they are way behind my lat a lot of people think the bicep just flexes the elbow which is certainly of course one thing that it does do but it also stabilizes the elbow when

you're doing things like that listen then straight straight holds yes straight arm work and gymnastics a lot of gymnasts have really big biceps and we talked about you talk about summer earlier today on the show he you know talks about this a lot where the bicep is actually the thing that you know excuse me the bicep gets really big because it's stabilizing the elbow and because when they're doing straight arm work like on the rings you know as you're doing as you're pulling yourself out of out of extension or or you're you're flexing your shoulder with straight arms or you're doing horizontal adduction with straight arms like the bicep is doing a lot of work in that case and gyms have really big biceps from straight arm work not necessarily because they do a lot of curls which would be bent arm work

right remember the the bicep originates in the shoulder, so it stabilizes the shoulder as well. Right? It's got to keep it in that position. So it's doing double work there. What about wrist pain and wrist strength? So, I mean, we have our grippers. We're thinking, when we think about grip, I think we're thinking about our ability to bend our fingers and not unbend them.

That's one way to think about it. How do I not unbend them. That's one way to think about it. How do I not unbend my fingers? I definitely see a lot of people walking around gyms with their wrists taped up, got the wraps and all that kind of stuff. And in my opinion, someone who's gen pop, if you're not competing, it might be a sign that there's a leak in your strength somewhere. And now I have this wrist pain, so I'm just going to wrap it up and do the exercise

that's prescribed on the board anyway. What do you guys think about that? I love the basic conversation of primary and secondary joints. So looking at hips, shoulders to create most movements. Like if there's something faulty in the hips, we're going to see knee and feet things very often. and the same thing with the wrist as it relates to the shoulder it's a downstream effect of other problems yeah i mean very commonly that's that's the thing so yeah mike i've increasingly gotten a little bit more critical of the band-aid solution as you

were describing it earlier um and i do think think that just these exercises that we've been talking about, and again, it comes back to awareness. Does somebody have awareness of what's happening in the primary joint to stabilize the secondary joint? Hunter was taking us through some wrist progressions before the show started. And I knew that my left side, I've got a lot of pathology on the left side from years of martial arts and stuff man I really felt it on those drills so um you know it's a combination that the shoulder is weak and this wrist has been weak for a long long time um so

I I really think that the shoulder stability issue both anterior and posterior I mean we're talking a lot about the posterior side of it but the you know that the pec recruitment as we rotate the humerus internally or is is significant as well as stabilizing the wrist depending on the movement yeah one of the things i've been doing a lot lately is a lot more wrist warm-ups so i think this happens and you know if i walk into a gym and I hop into a class and across a class or something like that, there's like tons of shit for your shoulders and your hips. It's like almost all shoulders and hips. And then, you know, there's not a lot of neck or wrist or ankle stuff going on.

And I started spending some time doing warm-ups and the stuff that Hunter was showing us today even. Started throwing that in my warm-ups and all of a sudden the entire body starts working and firing much, much better. And I think we could do a better job of looking at all the joints. Yeah, we should be warming up our pelvis and our hips and our shoulders first and then going out to our fingers. I agree with what you were saying earlier about the downstream effect thing. The easy example, of course, is if you don't have a good front rack, then if you're naturally kyphotic and so your upper back's rounded

over and then you have full external rotation in your shoulders so your elbows are down and then the bar sitting you know out towards your fingers and it's cranking you into extension then you're going to end up having wrist pain both in that front rack position then if you maintain that same position overhead with that broken wrist position the bar is back here just cranking you further and further into extension all the time then your wrist is going to hurt so that could be a positional and or mobility issue it could be it could be because you're you're bending forward really really far when you're front squatting because your ankles you know don't bend as much as they need to and so in order to get all the way to the to the bottom you have to stick your butt way way backwards

bends you way way over which drops your elbows down which is again further hurting your wrist so it's the downstream effect of not having good ankle mobility or a good upper back extension or shoulder external rotation there's all these things that could play into having something like a hurt wrist uh in that in that one example um but that's not the case in for all movements if you if you do a bench press as an example like there's probably not any other any other factors at play with while you're why your wrist is in extension other than you're just your wrist is an extension right i wouldn't say any factors but it's a pretty easy thing to do to just have a bar out in front of you and to be able to

you know put your wrist into a more neutral position where you only have about 30 degrees of extension versus 90 degrees of extension and there's not a lot of other things that are going to not let you do that other than the fact that um you're just you just don't know any better and you're just not being coached to be in the right position because everyone should have the ability to achieve neutral wrist position right there's no mobility issue i wouldn't say no but there's it's very unlikely you have a mobility issue that's going to keep you from just having a straight normal your hands are hanging at your side wrist position so that would be to be a coaching cue and or um you're just you're choosing not to do it or you just don't know any better yeah i have to deal with this with natasha all the time like she always has this problem so she always wants

to wrap her wrist natasha yeah always oh god her again uh so we actually have addressed this in two ways that have been very very productive and i'm going to give you a little sneak peek because I actually just dropped a video on my YouTube channel called Are Straps, Wraps, and Braces Cheating? And it's on my five-minute physiology thing, so you can go over that. But number one. Straps, wraps, and steroids. Yeah. I saw an article like that once. It was like creatine and steroids.

I was like, I don't know, man. That's a jump. Anyway, go ahead. Those are was like creatine and steroids. I was like, I don't know, man. That's a jump. Anyway, go ahead. Those are considerably different. Food and steroids. This guy's all hopped up a protein powder. Purchase. Number one is having a more active wrist.

So in other words, instead of just having the wrist there, be squeezing the thing as hard as you can. You mentioned earlier about pulling the kettlebell apart. We've been saying this. Pull the bar apart, yeah. Right, bar about pulling the kettlebell apart. We've been saying this. But being more active. And that changes you from being here in that 90 degree extension to being in that 30 degree position

almost immediately. So having your fingers on really, really, really hard and probably even over exaggerating that squeeze just to make sure, oh my gosh, okay, now I'm in neutral position and now I don't have those slight undulations in my joint position, which is what gives me the problem. Yeah. Then number two, we have to identify what the goal of that actual exercise is, what the goal of that workout is, what the goal of that week or month is. So if it is a day where

we are trying to work on that position, then the straps go away. Right. Right. We eliminate them. But if it's a day when we're trying to work, that position, then the straps go away. Right. We eliminate them. But if it's a day when we're trying to work, if it's a day we're trying to work heart rate or conditioning or whatever, then we'll allow her to put the brace on. Okay, I want you to be conscious of it, but really the primary purpose is over here. Right. But if you never, ever take that step,

if the only purpose of you ever is to get a hard workout in then that's why that elbow or that wrist thing is going to continually bother you the rest of your life because you never actually take the time in your training to address it and fix it and improve the position yeah i like what you're talking about being being strong in that that's one position uh in the in the presence of something trying to move it out of that position right and then another thing i've been experiencing recently, I've been working a lot with the steel clubs, and with the maces and clubs on both of those,

what I really like about that is exploring the end ranges of motion with weight and with rotational forces going on. So something with the wrist is I'm actually a lot of times putting pressure on the wrist and a lot of different from a lot of different directions as I go and exploring the end ranges of motion of my wrist under load and this is more of an endurance thing this isn't one of those things where I'm trying to hold like the heaviest club possible and and like really bend my wrist around but something that's been really healthy for my wrist has been the clubs and then also doing some of the gymnastics stuff that hunter was showing us on the floor is find the end ranges of motion

load it up just a little bit and then what i like about something like the clubs is it's very more uh grip endurance based uh so you know hold those clubs for five or ten minutes and go into some type of flow work right um and there's. And instead of there being just one type of grip, throughout the entire five or ten minutes, you're moving in a lot of different ranges of motion. It would be a great warm-up. I do them at the house before I go. I do some swings, and I get it all rotating.

Or every morning just to get up and get moving. Yeah. There's not a lot of training people do where there's resistance outside of just pure squeezing. Right. Where it's resistance as you're going through flexion, extension, and pronation and supination like when you're swinging a club. Yep. So it's very novel. One of the things that's happening with the club that you have to learn is because you're actually changing how your grip works throughout the range of motion sometimes your pinky is working harder

your index finger you're actually having to adjust your grip as you go and it is more about how little can you grip throughout it like i need to apply just enough pressure to get through this movement which is the opposite of what Andy was talking about, is create as much tension as possible to create that stability. So this is on the other side of the spectrum of let's apply as little pressure as possible so that we can get through these ranges of motion. But still be braced. And still be braced.

And I like having both of those scenarios. It's the same reason, like, you have a conjugate method where, where you know you have a day where you're doing a fucking max squat it's it's uh one rm and then you're doing some speed work but you're doing all that assistance work where you're you're working things in different angles higher volume work all that kind of stuff so you should be doing something that's maximal tension and then you should be doing things where you're just more of a muscular endurance type of situation yes speaking of max effort and powerlifting when i used to do the limit amount of competing and powerlifting that i did whenever i would do heavy deads i would i would very often think right as i'm going to pull like i would squeeze the bars absolutely

hard as possible and then i felt like that was just like like the trigger that i needed to contract as hard as possible everywhere else so if I started thinking about grip first and getting a really solid grip on the bar, the bar never felt as heavy. And because it didn't feel as heavy, I felt more confident with the pull. And I didn't start doing that towards the end of my time competing in powerlifting, but it worked really, really well. So now whenever I do heavy deadlifts, I always think squeeze the bar as hard as possible very intentionally, and then the rest of the lift feels easier to me. I found the exact same thing with my bench.

Yeah? I was going to say the same thing. Bench is where I notice it the most. Absolutely. You squeeze, and it turns everything else on in the shoulders. Well, that's why actually, again, if you talk to a powerlifter, they will talk about turning your lats on for a bench. Yeah.

Like, what in the hell are you talking about? And they'll tell you, some people will even say, and, you know, I'm not a high-level power lifter, but some people will say, hey, you should actually pull the bar down to you, right? We see these cues all the time. And whatever the cue you're using, what they're really just trying to do is, what we've been saying all along is use that hand position or pulling the bar apart to pull your shoulders into the right position so that your pecs are on the perfect amount of stretch, your shoulders protected and braced, and you can actually bench more if you do that. So really that cue is just to help you turn your lats on, set your shoulders, and be in control so you can actually contract everything in a synchronized fashion.

Yeah, that's a common cue for squats too. Pull yourself down bottom of the squat right and so super active one one of the things i've noticed from this whole conversation is uh there's a lot of things that are happening in the lower body in regard to we're looking at people's feet when they run and how's that impacting the knees and the hips well the same thing's happening at the hands yeah i think there's been a i I feel like I've put a lot of attention on what's happening at the feet and how that impacts posture and all this stuff, and I haven't put a lot of attention into grip and how that impacts everything upstream. Yeah, one thing we hadn't mentioned yet was pinch grip.

So earlier I mentioned that the thumb is the weak link. I think Kenny said pinch grip earlier. Did he? And we just ignored him. I don't listen to Kenny. I don't either. There were sleepy time jokes about Mike and Andy. He's fuming over here.

Inside. He's having a meltdown. Nobody listens to me. I said pinch grip. I said it like 17 minutes ago. It was on my list of thick things. You said five, and I knew the six was pinch grip. I said it like 17 minutes ago. It was on my list of sick things. You said five, and I knew the six was pinch grip. So back to Kenny's point about pinch grip.

Yeah, so the thumb's the weak part of the hand. If you have four fingers versus one thumb, the thumb isn't really going to win that battle. So towards the end of your workouts, if you want to do extra assistance work for pinch grip, I think that's a very wise choice in a lot of people's cases so you can just grab a plate you know grab a 35 pound plate and just just squeeze it in both hands and just farmer's walk with a plate on how big your hands are but yeah it depends how big your hands are so i'm a 10 pounder two and a half well actually actually there's a great way to do it that that uh we used to do back in back in high Like, you know, 15 years ago, we used to do this where you take 10s and you take 1, 2, 3, 4 10s.

High school 15 years ago, huh? Yeah. Yeah, okay. When I was 18, graduating high school. I'm 33 right now. You're fucked. So we used to do farmer's walks with large grip dumbbells. And then we also used to do pinch grip.

Sensitive about his age, I think. So we used to squeeze them together, and then – When Doug got angry. So if you're doing a farmer's walk with multiple tens in your hand, just iron 10-pound plates, if you have three of them, then once you stop squeezing hard, the middle one will fall out. Same thing, again, if you have four or even more. Number one, it changes the distance that your grip is.

So your thumb and your fingers get further and further apart the more plates you have, and it gets heavier. And then it's just harder and harder to do because the plates will slide out of the middle. So that's a fun way to do farmer's walks. If you don't have that or if you just want to just do plates, you can do that too. Hold a 25, 35, 45 pound plate. Again, they'll be different thicknesses and they're just heavier in general

of course when you get to the 45 versus the 25. You can play with the different options there. Another thing you can do is with dumbbells, you can put a dumbbell vertically depending on what type of dumbbell you have and just grip it vertically and just carry it like this. If you see how my hand is on the video.

You got dumbbells in here? Claw hanging. Yeah. They're in the other room. Want me to grab you one? They don't believe in them. They didn't do 17-1 or 2. Didn't do the open?

We have 1,000 dumbbells. But anyway, you can carry dumbbells not just like regular farmer's walk style, but you can change your grip position while you're carrying the dumbbell. So feel free to play with your farmer's walks and the different ways that you do grip training. The other thing as far as assistance work for grip training was the thing that we kind of mentioned earlier was doing like wrist rollers.

Oh, yeah. This would be way more common. Baseball days. That's right. Oh, yeah. This is way more common like in the bodybuilding circles and whatnot. That's what's funny. Baseball players love that stuff.

You're going to swing the bat. It's like one of the two exercises they'll do. Wrist curls and then more wrist curls. It's one of those because they're like, dude, when you swing the baseball bat, it's all about the wrist. Yeah, it is. I had a guy make that argument to me in high school too. They were like, no, no, no, like calves when you run like this.

You're missing the boat, dude. It's a dime on a dollar there, bud. So, yeah, wrist rollers can be really, really good. By the way, if you've never done it before, that can be like one of the most excruciatingly painful. And frustrating. Painful exercise you can do. If that.

Not like cardiovascular or anything like that. Not like airdyne sprints are painful. But like as far as like the deepest, most excruciating muscle burn you could do where you can keep going. And you're not total body exhausted. It's so localized. It's just more and more and more painful. And you get this ridiculous forearm pump.

It's a ton of fun to do. Do it with a bunch of your friends. Let's do it. We'll do before and after pictures. So do some of these wrist rollers. All you need is like a broomstick handle. Drill a hole through the middle. Run a string.

Tie some weights. And just go like that, right? And then I think Julie and Penelope had a pretty cool one where it was more fixed, which was cool. If you can go into a power rack and slide a bar through it, and then that way you don't have to hold it up with your shoulders or your shoulders fatigue before your forearms do. That way you can just twist it, and then it's, you know, as the cord wraps around it, it lifts up a weight from the floor.

So you can play without, you can just loop a kettlebell, just have a carabiner on the end, loop it under a kettlebell, and just clack it on. You can add as much weight as you want, and then just up and down, up and down, up and down until you just can't fucking do it anymore. It'll be very, very painful and a lot of need a we need a instagram hashtag so i want before and after pictures like like right on pump like yeah i want to see the forearm pumps because that's like

the biggest forearm pump you can get yeah yeah you'll you'll certainly notice on the pictures but the big thing is like actually touching your forearm you're like holy shit my form is rock hard yeah yeah show that to the ladies. It's a cool feeling. I know we didn't have this planned, but forearm care. We didn't plan for it, you can't say it. If you're going to start doing a bunch

of these things, and like you mentioned earlier, Doug, if you don't have a big history with this stuff, and all of a sudden you jump into all this forearm work, make sure you spend some time taking some care of those things because it's going to blow up your wrist or your elbow, and you're going to die. So Kelly gave me this really crazy contraption

where you stick your hand through it, hold it, and... Oh, it's great. Oh, it's the worst, the best. But whatever you have to do, the big mistake is just rolling your forearm is not going to be enough. Like, if you're like, oh, I rolled it out with the ball, what you need to do is do the same movements. You just put yourself through with the kettlebell or the mace or whatever,

and then you can add pressure to it and work the elbow, work the top, the back, the front, all the way up and down the whole thing, but make it active. That's what's going to keep you alive. Dovetailing that, too, if you're doing a lot of this work, it is going to put a lot, doug mentioned of tension onto uh the biceps tendon and like we talked about the pronated position as it relates to the radius you can also light up the ulna too oh yeah as well so like just be mindful to to take care of that because if if these forearms are lit glowing rock hard like mike wants them to be, you might pull a little bit early,

and then that tendon takes a little bit more stress than it might be able to handle. So just a little – this is from the oldest guy on the show. So something to mention. Listen up. I never listen to people older than me. But maybe the least broken. You might be the least broken, though.

But it is. When the forearms are tired and fatigued, you will start pulling early with the bicep tendon. So it's just something to be mindful of. For sure. One thing to think about, I've seen people, they're like, oh, I can't do pull-ups. I just don't have the grip strength for it or something like that.

And I'm like, well, you don't have the grip strength for it, but you don't have anything else for it either. You know what I mean? All that to say, like. You suck. You're a bad person. I just can't find any clients that will stay with me. It's weird.

Just the ones with daddy issues. They're the best. All that to say, like, it's not just about grip strength. Like, total body strength does matter in these cases. So, you know, for that same person, i gave them straps to do pull-ups like are they all of a sudden going to knock out 20 perfect pull-ups that they can't hold on to the bar it's unlikely you're going to be able to do 20 pull-ups and not be able to hang on to the bar it's it's total body strength so um you know the question becomes like how much of my grip training

should just be regular training like my grip is going to get stronger by doing deadlifts, and it's going to get stronger by doing pull-ups, and it's going to get stronger by gripping anything just day to day. So I'm working my grip all day. Who needs to just go do regular old workouts, and their grip will get stronger along with the rest of their body because they're just not very strong in general, and who needs to actually spend extra time doing very specific assistance work

in their warm-ups and or at the end of their workouts or have special days very specific assistance work, you know, in their warmups and or at the end of their workouts or have special days dedicated to assistance work? Like, how do you know which camp you fall into? I think if it's what's causing your plateau, like, oh, I can't get my deadlift to go up. I can't do any more pull-ups. Let's investigate what's going on with my grip. Let's work on it for a couple of weeks and see if we get any progress out of it. The other thing I would think about is am I experiencing any pain? So if you're experiencing wrist pain or anything like that, then we might need to investigate if creating, you know,

if there's some type of asymmetry or something like that, and right to left grip or even pinky to index finger grip and things like that. Yeah, Maxwell Haas was at Faction years ago, maybe three years ago, and while he was there he did a little presentation for our staff, and he was, I believe if I remember all this correctly, he gave the example of someone who, you know, they're doing a Metcon, and then after it's over he asks them, you know, what happened for you? And if they came and they were like, cardio-wise I was totally fine.

Like I didn't feel like my pull-ups were fatigued, but I kept having to hop off the bar on the kipping pull-ups because, like, you know, I'd do two and then I'd fall off, and I'd have to, like, shake my grip out, and then I hop back on, do two more, and shake my grip out, but other than that, they felt fine. Well, for that person, you know, they can do pull-ups, and they do have good overall fitness, and their cardio's fine, they're not breathing heavy, they just can't stay on the bar. Well, for that person, yeah, maybe you need, that particular person needs to do more for grip strength specifically, so he's saying for that person, he might have that person do intervals

where they're doing max kipping pull-ups followed by max farmer's walks. Take a break and do it again. Or maybe not max, but maybe they do 20 kipping pull-ups followed by max farmer's walk or whatever is like 80% for them on the pull-ups. And then the farmer's walk takes them to all all the way to true um true forearm grip fatigue and then they take two three minutes off and they do it again so they're in high intensity intervals where where their grip is the limiter towards the end of the set or something along those lines i would say or ask yourself have you ever specifically trained grip if you haven't and this is probably something you should go try so you might not even realize it

you might not feel these deficits uh maybe you're go try. So you might not even realize it. You might not feel these deficits. Maybe you're a weightlifter and you're like, well, I don't do all these pull-ups anyways. Take four weeks and really focus on it and then see what happens to your pulse. If it doesn't change that much, maybe that wasn't your problem. But maybe you'll go up 10 kilos or 5 kilos or 2. You'll learn something. Yeah, exactly.

So if you've never focused on it and you've been training for five or more years it's probably something you should go try time yeah yeah by the way if you want a good research for for grip strength specifically all the old iron mine oh probably do this too i haven't read them as much lately i used to read a lot more yeah 15 years ago towards the end of high school because my strength coach had becoming more accurate towards the end of high school because my strength coach had a subscription. Now he's becoming more accurate. Towards the end of high school. So my strength coach had Ironman subscription or whatever. It's like a quarterly publication where they talk a lot about everything, strength, weightlifting, powerlifting. And then in a lot of cases, grip and grip strength is a very large part of strength culture.

And that's not just the stuff we've been talking about, but the guys that wanted, bend nails for time and things like that. There's all kinds of really novel strength, grip strength activities that people do competitively. So if you're interested in learning a lot about grip strength, looking through a lot of the old Ironmind magazines is a very good resource. Do you have any Burt Sornex or any of those guys' stories about grip?

Because they used to do stuff all the time in NCAA. Yeah. Richard? Richard, specifically, Bert too, they're both fucking phenomenally strong.

But yeah, Richard had, I don't know if he had records or whatnot around grip, but he was well known, probably still is well known for having phenomenal grip strength. Like the inch dumbbell,

I think he was one of the only guys that just walked over to it and just picked it up. I think he used to take a $100 bill at the NCAA conference and put it underneath the dumbbell and say,

if you can pick it up, you can take it. Yeah. And then no one would be able to do it. Then he would walk over there and grab it, and everyone would be like, God damn it. Yeah. And he would put it back down. I can kind of roll it a little bit.

I can kick it over? Yeah. No, but I mean, really, like, grabbing it. Actually, this is really good advice from him. If I remember correctly, Richard said all the people that go over there and they try to go like this. He's like, no, you've got to just grab it straight, squeeze as hard as you can, and pick it up.

Trying to be overly flexed never works for anybody. I'm not sure if Bert ever did it. Bert probably did. He's phenomenally strong as well. These are the guys that run SorenX. If you know SorenX, they have a great line of equipment and whatnot. Google those guys. Richard in particular, who is Bert's father,

probably has great resources online regarding grip. Bert might as well, but I don't know as much about his resources. We have just a couple minutes. We do. Andy looks like he has something he wants to say. Well, Kenny and I have a little announcement if we're ready for that. I'll give you the floor, Kenny. Okay.

Well, Andy and I have been working with these guys for a long time, and we're going to continue to do so. And we are going to open up a show called The Body of Knowledge. We're going to release it in April. So we've been working really hard for the last six, nine months to kind of cultivate the ideas behind it. This is just simply to be a little tease for what's coming your way, but it's intended to be a show that combines Andy's expertise and science and my long background with coaching and the sort of interplay between those two aspects of getting people fit so it's short it's a season nine

episodes so it's not like an every week thing like that so um yeah early April looking forward to it very cool yeah yeah actually while we're on cool big announcements you have a book coming out too you want to mention that at all? Yeah, sure. He's like, no. Brian McKenzie and I wrote a book. So that should be out in July. Pre-sale should be up hopefully soon. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to officially tell you the title,

but I can tell you the gist of the title, which is Unplugged. So really what it is is it's for high-level athletes, the everyday person, or for the Fitbit-wearing crowd. And it's really a guide for the appropriate use of technology in training. So what are the limitations and the pitfalls from everything from using a mirror to a Fitbit to Dartfish? How can we use it appropriately? what are the mistakes that it causes,

and then as a side tangent, how do we take that from just our physical training practice and expand that on to bigger, better life practices? Yeah. So improving our connection with nature, why that matters, who cares about that, all the different challenges that we have to develop a system to overcome as our species moves more and more and more automated. And that's happening at a faster pace than we can catch up with on a physiological level.

And so it really is a discussion about how do we appropriately do that? Because we're not advocating Viggo Mortensen, you know, Mr. Fantastic or Captain Fantastic just detach and go in the woods, unplug entirely. That's just not going to work. But how do we more appropriately use technology in our everyday lives and trainings? So that is sold. They're printing it right now and that'll be out in July. Excellent. Thanks. Check it out folks. We'll be posting links.

We'll be promoting this stuff when it comes out on our social media. You bet. Thanks for joining us. Thanks fellas.