From time to time someone will reach out to me and ask me to take a look at their program. And sometimes the program is decent. It includes the right elements relevant to the goal. The volume and intensity are appropriate for the individual. And there is no interference of exercises. By interference I mean including something like deadlifts, farmer's walks and overhead hangs on the same day. These all require grip strength and the first exercise would limit ability in the other two.But it's no coincidence that I include exercises involving grip strength. Because this typically gets ignored from most training programs. And there are huge benefits to developing grip strength.Before jumping into all reasons you should be including grip strength in your programming we should first introduce Homunculus Man.[caption id="attachment_5479" align="aligncenter" width="291"] Homunculus Man - The size of the body parts is correlated to the sensory input from that part.Homunculus Man is graphic representation of the amount of sensory feedback from various parts of the body. You can see we get a lot of info from the head, specifically the lips, the hands and the feet. These body parts all send info to the sensory cortex in the brain.With the hands occupying a large section of real estate in the sensory cortex it makes sense to develop our grip and thus benefit overall with our training.The first benefit of training our hands is for safety. Our brains have something called neural inhibition which means we will be prevented from doing something if it will harm us. Imagine doing a heavy deadlift and not being able to complete the rep because the bar slips from our hands. This is an example of the body sensing the magnitude of the lift and causing our grip to open and thus drop the bar. It...

The body is a pretty amazing machine. And the more I learn about it and figure out what it can do the more amazed I am. One of the more interesting things, imo, is that we have built-in governers. You know what I mean by a governer, right? If you've ever driven a golf cart down a hill you're familiar how the speed is controlled when you descend a hill. This is in place for safety and to prevent tipping or crashing the cart. So what kind of governers does your body have? Well in our hands and specifically the finger tips we have more nerve endings than any other part of the body except for the mouth and lips. If we drew a self portrait emphasizing the areas with higher concentrations of nerve endings it might look something like this. [caption id="attachment_5008" align="aligncenter" width="279"] We learn a lot about our environment through our hands and mouth. Think about a newborn baby and how they learn about this new world. If they can grab something they will. And once they've gotten ahold of it it's going in their mouth. And while this can be a good way to learn and explore it can also be our early warning system if something is potentially dangerous to us. If we touch a hot element we flex in order to retract and pull away. And when we taste something awful we usually will spit it out. So how does this relate to training? Well imagine doing deadlifts. If someone were to injure themselves it would most likely be a back injury. Now if the load on the bar was more than our nervous system felt it could handle it would want some kind of an out. Because when you think about it grip strength is indicative...

So every now again I'll find myself looking around the gym seeing things that I don't understand. Don't get me wrong. Some of these things I probably did myself as some point. And looking back I'm not too sure why I did them. Maybe it was because I saw somebody else train this way. Maybe it was from a fitness magazine I was reading at the time. Or maybe it was just a bad habit I developed all on my own. But it doesn't change the fact that seeing some of these misktakes being made in the gym is like finger nails on a chalk board.Whatever the reason for developing these bad habits or using bad form the fact remains that I wasn't aware that what I was doing was bad and that I needed to change this. And so now when I see others making some of the same mistakes I once did I feel  compelled to help them out.But why not walk over and help that person right then and there you may be asking? For a few reasons including:1. The gym is the last place unsolicited advice seems to be accepted. Short of you injuring yourself on the spot I've found that many people prefer to be left alone.  Am I wrong  in assuming this?If you were doing this I may come over.So as long as you aren't going to kill yourself by what you're doing I may stay out of it rather than get into a debate with someone.2. I can reach more people this way. With these posts we can help thousands of people compared to individuals at a time on the gym floor.3. When I work out it's my time. I like to make my workouts as intense and short as possible. Stopping to help coach, correct and advise...