Your Grip is KILLING Your Gains (FIX THIS!)

Your grip during lifting is killing your gains if you are making any of the mistakes shown in this video. When it comes to reaching training goals, the thing that can derail you faster than anything else is an injury. When the grip is less than ideal (as is often the case with most lifters) then you

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere. Athleanx. com. It’s right, your grip is now killing your gains.

You see, we’re taking back the killing your  gains videos to actually make a good killing your gains video. Look, do something for me,  hold your hands out. I’m going to prove this to you right here. Right, take your hand, now  turn one of them to face yourself. Which finger is the longest?

For most of you, it should be  the middle finger. Jesse, the length of your middle finger has nothing to do with— No, no,  no, Jeff. You make an L and it’s the distance between your thumb and your forefinger. Oh my  God, that’s frightening. Okay, look, forget that, hold your hand out.

How long is the middle finger,  right? Now when you close your hand down, look at which finger is now the longest. For most of us  it should be that ring finger now extending longer down. Now that happens because anatomically the  way our fingers fan out we’re going to make that longer, but there’s an implication for this. Now  squeeze your hands as hard as you possibly can, squeeze those fingers into that base of your  hand.

Which one is exerting the most force? You can probably see on mine it’s that same ring  finger. The reason for that is that you’ve given yourself more leverage. This is the longest finger  being able to create the most leverage and force through your hand. Well, guess what happens  when you go grip a bar or a pull-up bar.

This finger tries to dominate, and when it does, it  creates problems all the way down here. You see, this inflammation right here is the most common  for anybody that’s ever lifted a weight. If you’ve ever done any type of heavy pulling movement,  you’ve likely at some point in your life dealt with some type of pain on the medial elbow here. It’s called medial epicondylitis or golfer’s elbow. It’s a pretty harsh pain.

It feels like  someone’s driving a knife right into your elbow. The reason for that is because— and break out the  markers to show you why— because there’s a muscle that connects these two points. And I talked about  this in the past, but it bears repeating here, because it’s going to make you really understand  this. It’s called the flexor— write this down, Jesse— flexor digitorum superficialis,  or FDS to make it a little bit easier for you, Jesse. Yes, it’s very difficult for me.

So  now what it does is actually got two heads. One head comes right off of that point and it comes  down here to the wrist and then it feeds off into two fingers, the fourth finger and the fifth  finger, and it inserts right here onto that middle interphalangeal joint here, okay, and our fingers. And the other one comes over here and it goes into the pinky. So then we’ve got this other head that  kind of comes off and shares a common tendon here, but what it does is it mostly comes off of the  radius, and it feeds down, and then it comes down here into the wrist, and then this goes  and it feeds off into the second finger, right, the pointer finger and into the middle finger. Well, because we know how much of a contribution this finger want to make in terms of any time we  make a grip on a bar or a pull-up bar, this is the one that not ironically is the one that’s got the  most tension and stress being placed right there at that insertion right here, on the medial elbow.

So what we want to do is we want to figure out a way now when we go to grip something, that we can  minimize the contribution of this, to minimize the dominance that this wants to do. Because you  guys can see it’s a pretty thin muscle. This can’t handle all kinds of heavy loads— weighted  chin-ups, heavy rows, dead lifts— it can’t handle that on its own. You need to figure out ways to  make that work. So, with that being said guys, let me take you over to our mock pull-up  bar to show you how to get this right every time.

All right, guys, so here’s our make shift  pull-up bar. What we’re looking for is two things, right? When we’re going to direct our hands into  a bar, and then lift our own body weight with or without additional weight, you want to make sure  that you’re not putting that bar too far out into those fingers for the reasons I just said  where we’re overloading all of them. Okay, you want to make sure that the bar is in a position  within the hand that’s going to allow you to take advantage of the additional strength you get from  the structure of the hand. The next thing you want to do is you want to minimize the contribution of  that fourth finger like we talked about.

So how do you do the first thing first? Well, guys, if  you have an inflammatory condition. Right, here, here’s a quick test if you have it, right? What  you do is you take your hands and you just cover three fingers. We’re going to test this finger.

You cover these three fingers, you push down right on that middle joint, just like that and you’re  trying to keep it from getting pushed down. So I’m trying to pull it up this direction. You shouldn’t  feel anything at that spot. Now you cover these three fingers, right, you keep them back and  you try to test this one out. You shouldn’t feel anything, it’s the middle finger.

Now you cover  those three fingers and you try to test this one here. And this is where it’s going to light  up like a Christmas tree. This is where that knife is going to be stuck right into that medial  elbow if you’re having this pain. And of course, you could test the last one by holding that one  back, and then pulling up on this. You probably shouldn’t feel much there either.

It’s just  reinforcing how bad it is. If it’s really bad, then a few exercise substitutions you should make  is to take anything that you’re doing underhand, and just flip it overhand for now to allow  yourself to get out of that acute phase. So if you have been doing underhand lat pull-downs,  you do over overhand lat pull-downs. If you have been doing chin-ups or weighted chin-ups, you  go to overhand pull-ups. You try to widen your grip a little bit too which will help.

And  if you have been doing mixed grip deadlifts, you try to go back to a double overhand. I’ll  get to that in a second. If you’re doing rows, any kind of underhand rowing should be substituted  with overhand rowing for the time being. But back to the pull-up bar, what you do is a couple  things, you want to target this joint right here. Okay, this is the joint that you want to be  aware of because this is going to dictate— Jesse, you can come around the back, I’ll show you what  we’re talking about— where this bar is being placed in your hand because you want to make sure  that bar is being placed deep into your hand.

So if I go and I grab the bar for a pull-up, and I’m  going to get down here as if I’m under the bar. What I want to see is I don’t want to see that  knuckle if I’m doing the pull-up. All I want to do is be able to see these. And if you get from my  perspective here, all you should be able to do is see these, right? So at that point, if I start to  fail, and I start to lose my grip, and I start to come down like this, all of a sudden guess what  pops up into view?

Those other knuckles that we talked about. You don’t want that. Because as  soon as that does, look at all of that stress it’s placing right at the end of those tendons. They’re hanging on for dear life, and again, this is going to do most of that pulling for the  reasons we already talked about with the most leverage that’s going to come right down here  and overload that medial elbow. Okay, not good, especially if you have additional weight that  you’re doing this exercise with.

So you only want