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Grip Training- Office Work Style


Bill Piche

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Are you one of those type of people that do paperwork all day, mainly do work at a desk or just sit in front of the computer all day at work? Do you need to work on your grip, but you have limited amount of time to do it on your spare time at home or at the gym? Well, I several ideas and exercises that you can do with this type of environment for grip training. The great thing about this is that at most, this type of training might not even cost you a thing. Isn't that great, free training?

First, there are the obvious kinds of exercises that you can do at work. You can have the hand grippers like from Ironmind or Heavy Sport, the Gripmaster, putty, grip balls, and even regular paper for crushing strength. Also, you can use gyro balls for wrist strength and static holds. Health balls, rubber bands for extensor work and hand health. You can work on your tearing strength by tearing paper, magazines, and even phone books. Last, if your lucky as I am, you can do some nail bending at your desk.

As you notice, all of these types of equipments are light and portable. These are items that you can leave at your desk and in your drawer. They are inexpensive and easy to buy and or find.

Well, I have several ideas that you can do, besides those from the norm. Mainly, you'll need paper, magazines and phone books or just any other type of books. This stuff can be found on an employee lounge, at home, or even at your own desk or co-worker's desk. I will be discussing on how to use them for pinch and wrist work.

Let's start with some pinch work first. You can use any of these materials to pinch onto, like you do with weightlifting plates at the gym. As you get stronger, all you have to do is add more paper, magazines, or books to the stack that you already have and then pinch to make the exercise harder. I recommend doing this on top of a chair or on your desk, in case that you drop your stack, it will make the cleaning or resetting your set much easier. You will be surprise that 1000 pages of multipurpose paper that is 8 ½" by 11" weighs around 40lbs according to Xerox.

How about trying some toss and catch with a ream of paper or a book? The same exercise that John Brookfield recommends in The Gripmaster's Manual, using a blob/block and/or a medicine ball. Just make sure you put tape, preferably scotch tape, on the seams for the ream of paper and on the edges on the book. All you will be doing is tossing the item up in the air, about the height of your shoulders and then catching it, before it lands on the ground. Besides working on your pinch, it will work on your reflexes as well.

If you want to work on your wrists, then you can take out less paper, magazines, or books from your stack and do plate curls with them. Also, hammer curls while pinching your stack of items will force you to work on your lower arms on this lift. To add a twist to this exercise, you can add levering as well, to help your wrists for nail bending. Last, if you want to make the exercise the most basic, you can do wrist curls and finger curls on your desk to also work on your finger strength.

The last exercise that I thought of was doing the Goerner lift. Instead of using bricks, you will be using phonebooks or other type of books for this lift. If you want to add more resistance, you can add more paper, magazines or books on top of each other to make the exercise harder. Just to let you know, this is a little bit harder on your grip, because books and/or phonebooks are slipperier than bricks and that they even might bend a bit as you add more weight to your stack. You can even make your grip work harder by using a thicker book as your base, in which you'll incorporate more thumb work to the exercise by emphasizing a wider pinch on your grip.

As you can tell, these lifts are done most of the time at home or at the gym. For the most part, almost all of our exercises that we do there are with weightlifting plates for resistance with the exercises that I've talked about on this article. All we did here is use different materials for weight. With some creativity and inspiration, this helped my grip training a lot. I hope this goes well for you, too. In the Gripboard, creativity and inspiration comes standard.

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