grip strength
Effect of Hand and Shoulder Position On Elbow Flexor Involvement During Curling and Pulling Exercises
This morning during a phone conversation with Greg Anderson the subject of the previous post on the effect of hand position on triceps involvement came up.. Greg mentioned, and I agree, hand position makes little difference to arm flexor involvement during curling and pulling movements as well.
Articles on arm training in bodybuilding magazines and web sites often make claims of different hand or shoulder positions or grip width having the effect of isolating or emphasizing one head of the biceps or a particular arm flexor (i.e. incline curls to target the long head of the biceps, hammer curls to target the brachioradialus, reverse grip curls to target the brachialis, etc.). While there is some truth to this - changes in hand or shoulder position affect the relative length and thus the ability of some of the elbow flexors to produce force - the effect on muscular development is greatly exaggerated. › Continue reading
The Ivanko Super Gripper
Our home gym has a small but respectable collection of grip tools. A few Iron Mind Captains of Crush grippers, an Iron Mind Rolling Thunder revolving deadlift handle, pinch-gripping block and 15″ loading pin, and my favorite, the Ivanko Super Gripper. While all of them have their place, if I could only keep one it would be the Ivanko.
The biggest advantage of the Ivanko over spring grippers is the ability to adjust the resistance from about 45 up to 345 pounds in over 50 steps. This exceeds the range of the first nine Captains of Crush grippers, from the 60 pound Sport to the 322 pound number 3.5. Only the Captains of Crush number 4 is harder to close than the Ivanko at it’s hardest setting, requiring a massive 365 pounds of force. This should be of little practical concern to most people, however, since only five people have ever officially closed the number 4 › Continue reading