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Why Strong Hands Matter

Why Strong Hands Matter

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...

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