Grips have become extremely popular over the past few years.
Today, we all want the grips with the most grip, all of the time! More grip = more ttb-right? However, relying on your guards alone for grip could be detrimental to your success and development as athlete. If the grips provide too much grip, then your hand and grip muscles do less work and over time, can weaken your grip strength.
A good pair of training grips should first and foremost provide protection for your palm to reduce the risk of calluses, tears and rips to your skin. This is what will help you train for longer and harder, not just the "grip" factor. There needs to be a trade-off between how much additional grip you need and how much protection you are getting.
A new pair of grips can be slippery at first. This is common with microfibre style grips as they need to be broken in. Using chalk and friction to roughen up the outer layer does the job.
However, if you still find yourself with slippery grips after a bit of chalk and bar work, it may be down to our grip and forearm strength.
Grips work by utilising friction between our palm, the grip layer and the bar. The more friction we apply onto the grip layer, the more friction is therefore applied to the bar, providing our with better grip. In other words the stronger our grip around that bar is the more in control we are.
Athletes with weaker grip/forearm strength will find it challenging to create the necessary force to apply friction on the fabric of the grips and the bar. This means if we can’t sustain that friction, we will end up coming off the bar.
This can be a frustrating experience, but should never be masked by purchasing the "grippiest" pair of grips. This will effectively halter progress and development of our grip strength and as a result we end up relying more and more on the grips and less on our own fore arm and grip strength.
In day to day training we should be focusing on using a grip that provides us with just about the same level of grip as our bare hand. This way we can ensure that we are not over relying on the grips but honing in one our rig skills and building our grip strength whilst still having good protection.
When was the last time you focused on your grip strength?
For competitions where every rep counts this is where "sticky" and "grippy" types of grips can have their time to shine! When we are in competition mode and your chasing that timer, everything I’ve just said above can go out the window (apart from the adhesive bit, you still can’t use adhesive!).
If you have any questions about grip strength or Reyllens line of gymnastic grips drop us message at Reyllen@reyllen.com today!
