Build Grip Strength for JiuJitsuWith These Five Exercises
If you’ve been practicing JiuJitsu for a while, you’d know that getting a collar choke hold on your opponent is only half the story.Leverage aside,you’d need enough grip strength to have a chance at landing a successful submission
Building Grip Strength
Before anything else, one thing that you’ll want to discuss with your coach or professor is you learning how to do a no-gi approach. Since you’re not strong enough yet, a grip on the actual arm is much better on your hands than holding on to your opponent’s gi.
Another thing to remember is to avoid overdoing your grip training. Sure, these tips are useful and will help your grip, but you’re going to do more damage than good if you train rigorously much more often than you rest.
That said, here are a few things you can do to strengthen your grip for JiuJitsu.
- Use a gi or a towel. Change your pull up routine by throwing a gi or towel over your bar and grab on it to do the exercise. Do the same for jumping pull-ups and body rows.
- Wrap a towel around your bar. Another way to change your pull up routine is to wrap a towel around your bar. You can do the same for your barbell lunges and one-arm rows.
- Lifting heavy things is one of the best ways to improve your grip strength. You can up the ante by taking the lifting gloves off and using some chalk if needed.
- Pull all you want. There are many kinds of pull-ups and chin ups that you can try and add to your routine. Make sure to try and add a new variation every now and then. If you’re already doing cable rows, high pulls, rope pulls and even body rows, then feel free to skip this. You’re already doing enough as it is.
- Strength endurance.Strength practice is necessary for grip strength, but you should never ignore strength endurance. One thing that you can do is to hang for a few seconds for a few sets on your fat bar, or just hold on for the same amount of time on the gi or towel you just threw over your pull bar. You can even try doing a farmer’s walk with your towelfieddumbbells. Regardless of what you do, though, your hold time isn’t going to be that long. That’s okay. Just don’t stop working and it’ll improve over time.
Grip strength is vital to JiuJitsu, but it’s not everything. Try not to focus all of your efforts into your grip strength, especially since it may lead to you neglecting other more important aspects of your game and that could be bad for you.
Work on your grip, take a few days off every now and then and be sure to try improving your technique as well as it may the problem, not your grip.
