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View Full Version : Benifits of Fat Grip Training



drtbear1967
01-17-2018, 11:39 AM
Have you ever been pissed because you found out that your gym strength didn't carry over into real life as well as you thought it would? "Carryover strength" often comes down to grip strength. And if we have to grab hold of something bigger than a dumbbell handle or an Olympic bar, our gym strength often disappears. But what if we trained with bars that were thicker? We'd develop more strength, not only in real life, but also in the gym, and it wouldn't just be grip strength. The strength would transfer over to overall upper body strength, too.

That's the premise of "fat grip” training, something Charles Poliquin has been yammering about since 1982 and there's at least a few studies to support the concept, the most recent one involving golfers. Division 1 golfers did 8 weeks of resistance training using fat grips and improved their ball speed, ball carry, driving distance, and left-hand grip strength more so than a control group. But what about the rest of us? Well, training with a thicker bar achieved through a wrapped up towel or some "fat grips" makes the grip much stronger, but it also has other valuable functions, as Poliquin has often pointed out:

1. Faster gains in overall upper body strength. Poliquin insists that using a thick grip increases motor unit activation, especially in fast-twitch muscle fibers. Try thick-bar training for a few weeks (up to 6 or 8) and then go back to training with normal-sized bars and see how much your strength has increased.

2. Elimination of any bi-lateral deficits. This one probably needs further investigation, but Poliquin believes that doing some thick-bar training will fix any strength deficits between one arm and the other.

3. Transfers well to sports. This one's probably a no-brainer, but training the grip will transfer over to grappling sports like judo and wrestling quite nicely. And, as Poliquin points out, most strength programs for sport chronically neglect forearm and grip training, so if you beef that up through fat-grip training, you'll automatically be able to do your sport better.