How to Improve Your Grip Strength for Real World Situations

Guest Article by Mike Rinderle

Strengthening your grip can help you excel in your chosen sport and in the gym, but what about your day-to-day life?

In this article we are going to look at 3 exercises that will help you look like a stud in real world situations.


Helping your buddy move: Nothing brings out the competitive nature in me like helping a buddy move. I do not want to be the first guy to have to put down my end of the cabinet, chest-of-drawers, or couch.

What usually gives out first in this real world test of wills is a person’s grip. Basically, moving furniture is a series of rim lifts with just your fingers or finger tips holding on for dear life.

To strengthen yourself in this area, find the heaviest Olympic plates you can, wrap your fingertips under the lip and hold for time.

Carrying groceries in from the car: I never want my wife carrying in more grocery bags than me, so I am always loading up the most plastic bags I can for each trip.

I don’t know about you guys, but 100 lbs of groceries hanging off individual fingers by those skinny plastic bags hurts!!! The key to making yourself impervious to the pain of grocery shopping finger torture… ring lifts.

Get some good quality rings that you can attach to a loading pin and do single and multiple finger ring lifts. Before you know it, you’ll own those plastic bags with no problem.


Opening a stuck jar: I don’t know about you, but I want to be the guy people hand the jar of pickles to when they can’t open it. There is nothing more embarrassing than not being able to open a jar and then have someone else pop it right open.

Opening a jar brings all kinds of grip strength factors into place: crushing grip, thumb strength, rotational strength. So any grip work you do will help in this test of strength, but the one that incorporates them all is the wrist roller. The one I have is made from a piece of 2 ½” PVC pipe. The larger diameter and smoothness really adds to the difficulty and you can set it up in a power rack in a couple seconds. It really hits the thumbs and forearms. Make sure you raise and lower the weight in both directions, and before you know it, you will be dominating any jar in the kitchen!

So there you have it. Three exercises you can add to your current workouts to become a real world grip stud! Have a great grip workout!

For more information, check out DieselCrew.com, a Grip Strength Training Site. It has hundreds of free articles on building superior hand strength. If you are looking for workouts that will show you how to improve you grip strength, check out his free program that includes 8 weeks of Grip Workouts.

Thanks for the article Mike!

All the best in your training.

Jedd