Are Your Fingers & Hands Your Weakest Link?

Your only as strong as your weakest link, this rings extremely true when it comes to your digits and hands.  We use them every day for pretty much everything we do, to holding our pencil when we write, carrying in the groceries, swinging a sledge hammer, grabbing an opponent with a vice like grip in BJJ, shaking someones hand or simply picking our children up to dish out the warmest cuddle in the world, our hands are the things that make this all possible possible.  Yet, even though we use them every day our hands and our wrists tend to be  underdeveloped compared to the rest of our body, we can see this when hanging from a bar in a chin up position or performing a handstand, generally our grip fails in regards to the chin up and wrists start to ache when talking handstands.

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Just like performing certain exercises like rowing and other posterior chain exercises to combat the state of flexion (think sitting or hunching over your computer) our bodies go through on a daily basis I believe its important to also work our digits in much the same way, and in fact, it is extremely therapeutic to not only the fingers, hands and wrists but also the rest of the arm as well.

Below I’ve showed off a little and put up some advanced variations such as the planche, HS, L-sit but you don’t need to be able to master these to get the benefits of fingertip training.  It all starts off with baby steps in the push up plank position and hollow body plank and If these variations are still to challenging simply start on your knees.

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Start off with 30 seconds and work up to 60 second holds and from there you can move onto pushups right up to handstand pushups on your fingertips!  In no time at all you’ll be enjoying the benefits of fingertip training and by strengthening your weakest link you will also make any other exercise that you perform, stronger and more effective!

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