The size of grip enthusiasts.

[Guest james]

Lee Priest is my favourite bodybuilder. His forearms are so chunky. I wish I had those forearms!

James

[Guest 86-1005097353]

Hi James,

Yes, some of the bodybuilders have amazing arms and forearms. A few that come to mind are Chuck Sipes, Bill Pearl, Steve Brisbois, Casey Viator, Sergio Olivia, Victor Richards and Lee Priest. There are many more, of course.

I have added a gallery of exceptional forearms to my site, and the one there of Lee is most impressive. It was taken from his web site  http://www.leepriest.com.

Have a look. You are quite welcome to post photos there, too. I have posted two articles that I composed for Ironman about training for size. The unedited versions are on my site under *Training theories*. I have also included links to a few of the sites of interest to grip enthusiasts.

http://communities.msn.com/GripStrength

[Guest tomykelly]

I like the motto of John Grimek about how you should look if you train with weights for looks ( bodybuilding) or strenght  .

" Look like you could rip a tree out of the ground and run up a hill with it "

[Roark]

The longtime difference between lifters and builders

has been that the former do not care how they look

and the latter do not care how strong they are. This,

of course, is a very general statement, and there are

exceptions.

Somehow it strikes me that if John Brookfield were

anorexic but retained his phenomenal strength, he

would be deemed more an anomaly than a strong

man.

In other 'exercise' movements (chest, legs etc) there

is a definite, noticeable correlation between strength

increases and muscular development. The hand displays

very little in the way of flashy muscular appearance.

The forearm, of course, has much potential.

It seems to me to be an interesting position that

a choice must be made between good development

and strength. Lifters/builders. Years ago one of the

champion weightlifters snidely made a comment

about Schwarzenegger, and said that Arnold could not

outlift him in the olympic lifts. True. But this lifter failed to

mention that he himself would go into cardiac arrest

is he tried to follow Arnold thru a bodybuilding workout.

In my opinion, and I am not trying to convince anyone,

this is just an opinion: personally, if one could place an

order for muscle/strength, I would ask for a Fed-Ex

delivery of Dorian Yates forearms with a blend of

Sorin/Horne/Brookfield's strength. Then I'd hire on in a

junkyard and rip the hoods from cars without using a

wrench.

[Guest Jeff Roark]

Roark,

I agree on almost everything you said but one thing. That particular weightlifter might not been in shape. I have done lots of bodybuilding work in the past, ranging from Arnold, Pearl,Mentzer, Simmons, Kubik, singles to 20 reppers. In all this time i have found nothing that got me in shape like intensive Olympic lifting. I think the majority of o-lifters could bury any bodybuilder in solid base building exercises. This is only my opinion. Cheers!

Jeff Roark

[Guest 86-1005097353]

The strongest man contests are won by huge men. Franco Columbo, the former Mr Olympia injured himself doing a refrigerator feat. Mike Dayton, the bodybuilder, was a strongman. So was Chuck Sipes.

Reg Park wanted to be the strongest and biggest man alive. He had to specialize because it isn't possible to be both. Greg Kovacs tried, too, but hasn't succeeded in bodybuilding.

John Grimek, Sergio Oliva, Bill March and a few other champs were also weight lifters.

I have done all the lifting and bodybuilding contests and it is my opinion that weight lifters resent bodybuilders because the bodybuilders are perceived as being stronger than the weight lifters. That is what the public think. Only the heavyweights and superheavyweights look as strong as they are. Until I won "Strongest Man on Campus" contests at UBC bodybuilders weren't respected for their strength. I broke the university dead lift record. In those days we were all drug free. We called ourselves "figleafers" because the football players used to tease us about posing and looking in the mirror. The teasing stopped after that contest. Most of the football players who enterred the contest couldn't survive the plate pinching feat required to participate! I think the plate weighed about 60 pounds.

The grip men may or may not be large. However, perhaps a good big man will still beat a good small man. I don't think Sorin or Horne are small men.

[Roark]

Vince,

Someone at UBC must have known a little iron

history, 'figleafer' as a term for bodymen has been

around quite a while.

Is UBC where your interest in pinch gripping began?

Whose idea was it to use the pinch grip in that

contest as a filter for competing? Had the pinch grip

been used as a filter before for that contest? What

was the response of the men who could have done

well in the deadlift being thwarted by the pinch grip,

which they surely must have viewed as irrelevant?

Did you happen to meet John McCallum in those days?

[Guest 86-1005097353]

Hi Joe,

We used the gym under the old stadium at UBC. That is long gone. The administration decided we bodybuilders could no longer use the gym there in 1964. So I decided to form the "Fig Club". We wrote a constitution, elected officials and formed a club and were given keys to the gym. Later I decided to hold that "Strongest man on campus" contest. It was my idea to do the pinch grip. A few of the bodybuilders just made it. I didn't make the weight too heavy, but a couple of people couldn't compete. The former dead lift record was held by someone from the past and I never knew that person. His record was 521 pounds and I did 525. I trained about a month for that contest and weighed about 190 pounds.

I started bodybuilding in 1959 in Kamloops in a neighbour's basement. I read some of the magazines and tried to chin myself on the floor joists. Well, trying to hold my weight was how you had to start. Within 6 months I was benching 200 pounds at the age of not quite 16. Guess I was always interested in gripping after that. We fooled around with that thick block at UBC but I am not sure what I lifted on it. Maybe 90 pounds or so. I always seemed to do well compared to others in pinching.

I never met John McCallum. I came from the exercise science field and he was more a writer. The strange thing was I won the Mr Canada in 1970 in Vancouver and moved to Sydney, Australia in January 1971 so I never got any attention for winning that title. I bought a gym that was going broke in August 1971 and built it up to the present size of 30,000 square feet. I even built a posing stage complete with contest lighting and curtain! I've designed and personally built about 3/4 of our equipment.

We always called ourselves figs then. Bodybuilding was figleafing.

[Guest]

Just measured mine with a straight wrist and clenched fist. I only measured my right forearm.

Forearm - 11 7/8

Wrist - 6 1/4

I'm 17, 5'6.5" 132 lbs. It is a lean measurement as I was measured at 7%bf by a physician and am now somewhat leaner than I was than.  Don't really do and forearm training besides grip, and I only train for strength.  Don't care about how big I am.

Michael Falkov

[Guest kINGPIN]

Thge beauty about training Hardgainer is that we train in order to be strong in the hope that size will follow.  We squat heavy, we dead heavy, we bench heavy, we chin heavy we row heavy etc.  We do not use isolation exercises except for those that are otherwise hard to target e.g calves.  It must be a year since I have done a bicep curl.  All my work is done on compound movements in order to get strong.  The theory is that if we can dip 20 kgs more, how can we not be bigger.  So in order to get there we progressivly load more weight to the bar.  In a way we are trying to kill 2 birds with one stone.  to me, the two go hand in hand.