Today, I wanted to talk about forearms.
Whenever I think of forearms, the first character that comes to mind in Popeye.
I'm not going to tell you to eat your spinach so you can grow up to become a big and strong gymnast. But if you want to be able to perform sick gymnastics skills like handstands, planche, muscle-ups and forward rolls, you'll need to train your forearms.
Grip strength can often be the limiting factor in the Olympic lifting, deadlift, muscle-ups, max numbers of pull-ups, or even your back squats and handstands. In part one of this post we talked about the importance of the pinky finger, in this post we will take a look at some different ways to test and train grip strength.
Have you ever stopped to consider the importance of grip strength? Barbells, kettlebells, dumbbells, the pull-up bar and gymnastics ring. When using any of these pieces of equipment, it’s your grip strength that’s typically one of the first things to fatigue.
Lots of coaches, quite rightly, place a great deal of attention on the feet and the posture of an athlete, yet our hands are just as important. Poor grip strength and function will lead to poor positioning, medial elbow pain, injuries, and obviously a decrease in overall performance. Grip strength can actually help improve muscle activation in the deadlift, bench press and even the squat. Knuckle placement, the supinated, pronated, semi-supinated, Olympic lifting hook grip, gymnastics hook grip, false-grip, and wrist mobility are all important elements that coaches should understand and talk about.
