Many martial arts involve gripping, holding, pulling and such. All of these needs good grip and finger strength. I personally don't have big tough fingers / hands and wrists. This is the area that really have negative impact on my trainings Any crash course I can take on? Even nutritional information that might be helpful, thank you.
I asked my instructor this very question, concerning conditioning of the hands for gripping. his answer was to reach over, grab a handful of my gi and start dragging me around by it. If you want a good strong grip, grip things.
Mastery of Hand Strength by John Brookfield is a great book on gripping and exercises you can do for the grip. He's a pro strongman and one of the biggest experts around in this field. If you want more responses for this topic you might want this in the Health and Fitness section. Want me to move it there or do you want specific ninjitsu responses?
I have a really weak grip and am currently training to improve it. Good exercises include Farmers walks, plate pinching, gripper training, levering and filling a duffle bag with sand and throwing it about. For some excellent ideas visit http://www.dieselcrew.com/ and go to the articles section, particularly the articles Combat grip training and Grip strength training
Okay, now taking bets as to how long it will be before someone says something innocent about "grip" that ends up as someone's signature.
Judo players often loop their Obi (belt) over a strong object and grab each end and pull and turn, twist etc as if it were an uke they are trying to throw.
Aye, this is true. I'd also recommend strong elastic for the same exercise, it has some give in it (so it doesn't wreck after a while)
I feel your pain, this is the result of a physical evaluation I did at my fitness gym a month ago. Average combined grip should be around 90-100kg. Mine was 65kg. I'm now on a mission to improve my grip strength. El Macho over on Bullshido gave me a lot of nice pointers. I've picked up a Captains of Crush 'guide' gripper (60lbs) and I'm about to upgrade to the 'sport' (80lbs). I'll tell you now, if you suffer from a chronically weak grip like me, it's not easy to build it up, at least not so far.
go for a play at your local climbing wall, then find out how much grip you have after about two hours, i remember after one session having to a sit at my local bar and drink a pint with a straw, couldn't lift it. lol. Climbing does wonders for your grip, breathing and relaxing in a stressful situation. have fun..
It's not actually that hard. Ironmind sent me a catalogue with a mini-guide to making gains with the Captains of Crush. They recommended doing this several times a week and on the other days work the fingers extensors: 1) Warm up on a gripper you can close fairly easily. Do 10 reps each hand for 1 or 2 sets. 2) Using a gripper you can close 2 - 9 times, do a set to failure with each hand. Repeat if you can. And that's pretty much it! Personally I do that on my non-workout days (lifts such as deadlifts inhibit any grip workout) and warm up with a HG 100 then do a set on the CoC1 and a set with the 1.5. Finish with some complementary work with an IMTUG on individual fingers. On the other days I use rubber bands to work the extensors. I'm now quite close (as in millimetres) to closing the #2
Well, I personally used a glove with loops through the fingers that could then be attached to weights with rope to help my grip. The loop goes through the side of each finger and thumb of the glove, this should come through each side front to back of the fingers and wrap around the tip of each finger. This is just a small loop around the finger tip itself. Than to some weight you can make another webbing thing with hooks on each end to hold weight you can lift by each finger. You need a leather glove, the loops where made of webbing it can hold a bit of weight. The other thing from Shuai Jaio they do belt cracking. Take a belt, any leather or cloth belt and snap it like you did when you where young. Add the pivot with you feet and hips, do like owe about 500 times. This when i first got the idea it was from a guy that sold a patten for the glove idea to it so i got a patten for the one i made an he sold this through like Karate and Kung Fu magazine. It works.
