Strengthen Your Grip For Martial Arts

Those in the martial arts community should know that grip and hand strength are a very important part of their fighting abilities. Whether it's on the offence when you need to use your hands for punching, where your hand needs to be tough to prevent injury to you and to inflect more damage to the opponent. Or on the defense when you need to be able break from the grip of your opponent and apply your own crushing grip.

You should be doing the common workouts for grip training such as the pinch grip, hand grippers and wrist curls but due to the nature of fighting your wrists will twist at different angles and giving them extra attention will really help. For the wrist, try holding a weight plate with your fingers on the flat side and your thumb on top. With your palm facing up place your wrist on your knee or better yet on the edge of a table. Rotate your wrist so you move the plate in a circle, try going both directions. You may have to find a weight that suits you but do not make it easy.

For leverage, try something heavy like a sledge hammer. Hold your arm at your side and just rotate the hammer upwards then lowerback down using only your wrist. You can adjust your grip up or down the handle to make it harder or easier. If you don't have a sledge hammer you can substitute for something else, such as a long 2 x 4 or broom. For a variation hold your arm out in front of you and rotate the weight in circles using only your wrist.

For most people the wrist is the weaker area of the arm, if you can strengthen this you will be way ahead. Having a stronger wrist will reallypresent it's benefit when you start to do twisting motions and you are still able to hang on.

About the Author

Go to Grip Strength for more info on how to improve your grip strength. Tim Archbold's interests are Fitness Training and Health.