Forearms, Hands, Fingers and Push-ups

One thing that I've always stressed since I started blogging is that there are other ways to make strength training harder than by incremental weight increase on the resistance you're working against. Resistance, and level of difficulty, can be increased in a lot of different ways. Accepting this fact and exploring it further is how we can get stronger without constantly needing to be tethered to an increasingly large source of iron to get strong.

Push-ups and Pull-ups, of all size, shape and flavor, are the staple exercises for upper body strength training for BW aficionados. A lot of us could work the most basic, vanilla, and well-known pulls & chins for a while before we get to the point of needing modifications to make them harder. The former needs changes sooner. Both of them can be made more difficult by a simple change: add an element of grip, finger and/or forearms training to them.

The hands are really, really important to our body. I know that sounds like a no-brainer but I don't think we really realize the extent. Our hands are packed full of nerves and sensors. A really hilarious series of pictures are out there. They take into account how many sensors there are in various body parts and relates them to size. The hands are very small in relation to, say, the arms and chest. Yet, they have many times more nerves and sensors. So, if we were to scale the hands up in size in relation to the number of nervous system stuff in them, we might look something like this...
How we can relate this information to making push-ups, pulls & chins harder is easy to understand with a simple test that you can do right now. Make a fist in front of your body and squeeze...REALLY! FUCKING! HARD! Notice how your entire arm, shoulder and chest contracted really hard? Do the same thing but now put your arm overhead. Note your back muscles.

There's also another, easier way to relate why throwing hand work into your push-ups and pull & chin work makes them harder: instability. Where you used to have a nice, solid and stable closed chain exercise, now you have reduced the amount of contact that you have with the object you're pulling yourself up to or the floor you're lowering yourself down to. When you train with a compromised grip, the whole notion of flying through the eccentric part of the exercise for the sake of making it easier is over. Now you actually have to focus, rather than drop through it!

Okay, so the next step would be adding this into the workout. Pull-ups and chin-ups are far more straightforward for grip training. Grip is such an integral part of the exercise already. All you have to do is find something else that's much harder to grip than a 1" thick bar that everyone seems to use. Towels are a prime candidate. You could grip two towels, wrap a towel around your bar to thicken it up, or take a thick towel and grasp both sides of it. Add to the insanity by supinating the grip when you do the pull-up.

Just a sampling of the stuff you can grab onto rather than a pull-up bar

The answers for push-ups aren't as obvious, and frankly the easiest probably scares the shit out of a lot of people: do push-ups on your fingers. It's easy to understand why because this is brutal on the hands and fingers. Still, it works so, damn well, so grow a set already! If this is too crazy for you, you could always elevate your upper body by doing fingertip push-ups on some sort of blocks. This will drop some of the upper body weight off your hands and get you used to the exercise. For those of you who bang out lots of fingertip push-ups without a whole lot of effort, do the opposite: place your feet on some sort of block, a chair or a bench. Don't ignore the fingertip treatment for your other push-ups. Jack Lalanne used to do superman push-ups on his fingers. I've started doing fingertip handstand push-ups...


One step up in difficulty would be doing your push-ups on one hand... or should I say, five fingers...

Another option for push-ups would be to find a welder near where you live and show him this picture....

FYI, if you buy these from this guy, you're dumber than the people buying Shake Weights!

Anyone with a band saw, a drill and a stick welder could easily make you a pair of these for a dirt cheap price, probably in about 10 minutes, and that's stopping to have a beer after making the first! They're really hard on the grip though! Just do me a favor and under no circumstances buy these from anyone online! You're just getting ripped off if you do so! Well, these and these are a little more reasonable...

Oh, and of course you'll get really strong hands, fingers and grip if you keep training like this. That's the most obvious benefit to this sort of training. What I wanted people to note is that throwing in some grip training into your workouts does a lot more for your body than just make people fear your handshake.