Grip Strength and Hand Training for Jiu-Jitsu

All right, everybody, welcome back and thanks for joining us on the Unknown Strength Podcast, where we aim to provide you with insights into the fight game and strength and conditioning training that translates into optimal performance in the cage, the ring or on the mat. I'm your host, McGregor McNair, and joining me are my co-hosts, Brenton McKittrick and Steve Phillips. Now, this is part two of the Luke Lehman and Zoe Knight podcast, who are the strength and health optimization gurus behind MuscleNerds.net. So if you missed part one of the interview, definitely go back and listen to that from the start. Luke Lehman is one of the foremost experts on health hormone and general performance, and his partner Zoe is the managing director of the company and also a goldmine of information. And if you're a fighter or in the fight sports whatsoever, definitely listen to this interview in its entirety because there's so much valuable information that just about everyone in the fight game can benefit from. Absolutely. So without further ado, here is the interview. The sport of jiu-jitsu is incredibly group-orientated, particularly with the gi, even judo, so it's something you'd have a lot of experience with. You know that the hands take an absolute beating, so it's a fairly accepted reality, but by the time you get the black belt, you pretty much need to forgo any aspirations of being a hand model. So something that I find that sometimes my grip is the first thing to go on a strength session, having been so heavily utilized in my jiu-jitsu training. I feel like my hands become the weak point. My hands are so burned out. And when it comes to doing, I guess, the higher volume exercises like deadlifts sometimes, I feel like my back, my hips, my legs, my entire posterior chain could pull, you know, could pull a serious weight. But then I find that my hand just gripping it is a challenge. So do you have any suggestions or perhaps adaptations to the training, I guess to get value or get a result out of that? Yeah. You know, if you want to train your hands, you've got to train your hands. So some of the things we'll typically use are things like belt or gi pull-ups, right? So we'll do that. We also do ironmind.com. www.ironmind.com has a ton of grip stuff. And I used to be really big into the grip things and bending horseshoes and nails and tearing phone books and all that type of stuff. But if you want an adaptation to your hand, you have to train your hands, right? And a lot of the guys will get pretty gnarly hands. Our friend Leo over at the Irish Strength Institute enrolled with him just a little bit last time we were in Ireland. And I outweighed the guy by probably 30 kilos. He just completely fucking humiliated me. His hands, when he grabbed me, I thought I was going to shit my pants because I thought he was going to break my bones. and you would grab him and he's so explosive and so strong. It's like wrestling a piece of metal, you know. But doing things like the specific hand things like actually working your finger grip. So Iron Mind has a thing called Eagle, I think it's called Eagle Claw or Eagle Grip and you can hang that from a bar and you can do pull-ups with that and it causes you to actually work your fingers, not just your crushing grip. so that also keep in mind that you have muscles on the back side of your hand as well that never gets uh it never gets um worked so what what i used to do is i would get uh go buy a package of rubber bands and i would put the rubber bands around my fingertips and i'd extend my hands and what that would do is it would save it saves a lot of trouble with things like getting uh golfer's elbow kind of like an agonist antagonist type movement exactly same thing as we said with the boxers if you don't have a really good upper back and really good external rotators and really good scapula it's going to inhibit your ability to throw a punch really really hard so same thing with your hands you need to make sure you're working that antagonistic and you need to be working things for time like um you know if you're going to do like the grip strength you need for a deadlift or like a bar hang is going to be different than when you're actually using your fingers to hold on to a gi so doing doing hangs but hang on to your gi taking a belt and cutting it in half and wrapping it around a bar and doing your deadlifts by holding on to the belt instead or straps instead of holding on to the actual bar. Go rock climbing. Yeah, rock climbing. Oh, rock climbing. I actually went rock climbing about a month ago and I found that at the end of the week, after doing jiu-jitsu all week, my fingers are just that shot that I could definitely persevere through the pain but it's something that I guess requires delicate balance. So, um, like if you don't use it, if it's, it's going to fatigue and get sore. Yeah. Like the more you use it the more you become what the word I looking for Like accustomed to it Yeah And how many people will work their fingers but they don stretch the fingers back out They look like they have little lobster hands because they're always flexed instead of relaxed. Yeah, you've got to balance them out. Yeah, I mean, we had our first climbing experience in London with the guys at We Move Magazine. Yeah, man, these guys were like goddamn monkeys. They were just doing these ridiculous jumps from one platform to another, and Zoe and I were just trying to manage the first fucking level. Oh, man, yeah. Our fingers are gone after that. You see them pretty much launch or catapult themselves from one little grip to another just off their pinky. Yeah.