Grip and Abs on Off Days

Why would you not train your grip?

Whomever said “Just do deadlifts”, you’re wrong. Many times your grip fails before your hamstrings. Besides that, your forearms are probably one of the most important parts of your body- any sport you do, you’re grabbing something.

I do grip work whenever I can. All it takes is a couple sets at the end of your workout to burn them out. An extra five minutes.

I used to train abs heavy everyday. I really should continue this trend, just no time.

Point being, you can go really heavy with something like abs and NOT burn out. If doing heavy ab training is hurting your recovery (if you are always sore from ab work, you might wanna check up on that), well, your recovery sucks, so work on it.

I just throw a couple sets of block pinches or gripper work on the end of my lower body day for grip and some wrist flexion/extension after upper body work. Takes like 8 minutes 33.769 seconds and isnt that taxing. I dont typically do heavy deadlifts and rackpulls in the same workout though.

[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
Why would you not train your grip?

Whomever said “Just do deadlifts”, you’re wrong. Many times your grip fails before your hamstrings. Besides that, your forearms are probably one of the most important parts of your body- any sport you do, you’re grabbing something.

I do grip work whenever I can. All it takes is a couple sets at the end of your workout to burn them out. An extra five minutes.[/quote]

There’s a difference though between training your grip and over training your grip. For the some hand crushers, plate pinches, bar hangs, heavy holds or whatever can be a necessary part of one’s supplementary exercises; its also sport specific too. However, for others doing deadlifts and heavy shrugs and rows is their grip training. IMO a 500lb deadlift without straps is a better grip workout than anything you can do with a hand crusher. Again it is sport specific, if you are a grappler there might be more fine tuned exercises to attack your grip.