Building Hand and Grip Strength

 Building forearms and grip strength is a good proxy for understanding the muscular system and how it is designed to ensure one’s health and fitness — but are essentially ignored and neglected by most excercisers, and particularly denotes the end-stage of life for most people.

The contemporary buzz of medical researchers is the claim that all disease is caused by inflammation, or the accumulation of toxic fluids in the tissues of the body beginning at the extremities of the head, hands and feet — where circulation is poorest because that’s where the push from the heart dissipates, and the contractions from the skeletal muscles beginning at the extremities begin to push the blood back towards the heart — to clear space in the capillaries and tissues for new blood to come in. It is a naive understanding to think that the heart can overcome the resistance of miles of capillaries where blood is hardly moving. But a contraction beginning at the most distal (distant from the center) insertion will contract to its origin, which then will tie into the insertion of the more proximal muscle supporting it, and so on — back to the center.

That’s why people who are active and get this activation, become more muscular than others. The waste products from cell metabolism are sent back to the purifying and recycling organs of the body — creating room for new fluid (nutrients) which produces health and growth. It is that very process of circulation — effected by the alternation of the contraction and relaxation phases of the muscle. That’s why in exercises, it is important to move from the greatest relaxation to the greatest contraction — while focusing on increasing that range more than any other consideration — including how much weight one is using in the exercise. More often than not, the weight is often a hindrance to achieving those extreme ranges of articulation — and one is better off effecting those ranges without any weight or resistance.

This ideal movement can be simulated by a simple movement called the wrist roller — in which one had a rope tied to a short bar attached to a light weight and lifted the weight up in one direction and lowered it with the opposite movement. For most people, that exercise can be simulated to give a better result without the apparatus at all — but simply focusing on that movement — particularly extending the range of the contraction — which most people tend to omit, and so they believe that developing the forearms, calves and neck muscles are difficult if not impossible to do — because their range of movement is too limited.

What they need to do is not add more weight — but increase the range of their movement, and also increase their repetitions to 50 — at which most people experience noticeable muscle fatigue, burn, or pump — resulting in extreme muscle soreness for days after. The remedy for recovery from extreme muscle soreness is to do that movement the next day and the next — because those alternation of relaxation and contractions, are pumping the inflammation out of the tissues. That is the quickest way to ameliorate extreme muscle soreness — over the next few days, rather than doing nothing at all and letting that inflammation fester.

Most trainees never come close to a full contraction or full relaxation in any of their movements — which is the reason it doesn’t work. This is particularly true of the older bodybuilders whose joints have been so compromised that they can barely move — yet still insist on handling as heavy weights as they can doing half-movements. Increasing the weights assuredly won’t make them better — but increasing the range of their movements will because the range of motion dictates the range of the contraction and relaxation — and increasing that difference, increases the flow — while maintaining a steady state of muscular contraction does not. That is how most people do their exercises — unproductively.

The position most think is a contraction is not — nor is the relaxed position. Taking the bench press as an example, if one begins to press upwards from the “finished” position, one will notice how quickly the muscle will tire because one has achieved a supercontracted position. Likewise, most people do not go into a superrelaxed position but instead bounce the weight off the floor or off their chest because everybody knows how hard it is to begin a movement from a dead stop. The only way to do it safely is to use a very light weight — or no weight at all, and just learn how to achieve the greatest muscular contraction, alternated with a relaxation — for that pumping effect alone — which is not nothing, but the most healthful thing one can do — and by doing that produces the health, functioning and growth one ultimately hopes to achieve all one’s life.