summarize: Almost everything we do in fitness, and in our daily lives, goes through
our hands. If our feet are our contact with the ground, absorbing force, our
hands are how we transmit force. They are our interface with the rest of our
world. Grip strength—how hard you can squeeze—is only part of the
equation. Our hands are quite amazing, actually, in that they are powerful
enough to crush the juice out of a lemon yet dexterous enough to play a
Beethoven sonata on the piano. Our grip can be firm yet feathery,
transmitting force with finesse.
It’s all about how you distribute force. If you can transmit and modulate
force through your hands, then you can push and pull efficiently. This force
originates in the powerful muscles of the trunk and is transmitted down the
chain, from rotator cuff to elbow to forearm to wrist. There is a strong
correlation between having a weak rotator cuff (shoulder) and weak grip
strength.
But it starts with finger strength—which, unfortunately, is another thing
that we have sacrificed to comfort and convenience. Back when we carried
things, we had to have strong hands to survive. No longer. Many of us don’t
really even use our hands for much besides typing and swiping. This
weakness means pushing and pulling movements bring a higher risk for elbow
and shoulder injury.
Because we are not “training” grip in our daily lives, we must be
deliberate in our workouts, focusing on initiating movement with the hands
and utilizing all the fingers with our upper body movements. Adding carries
to your training is a great way to train grip, but it is important always to be
mindful of what your fingers are doing and how force is being transmitted
through them.
One way that Beth likes to illustrate the importance of this is via a basic
bicep curl with a (light) dumbbell. First, try the curl with your wrist bent
slightly backward, just a bit out of line with your forearm. Now try the same
bicep curl with your wrist straight. Which one felt stronger and more
powerful? Which one felt like the fingers were more involved? It’s about
building awareness of the importance of your fingers, as the last link in the
chain.
One last way in which grip is important is in situations requiring reactivity
—being able to grab (or let go of) a dog’s leash when needed, or gripping a
railing to prevent a fall. Our grip and our feet are what connect us to the
world, so that our muscles can do what they need to do. Even in a deadlift:
one of the key things Beth taught me is that a deadlift is as much about feet
and hands as hamstrings and glutes. We’re pushing the floor away as we lift
with our fingers.
These moves and drills that I’ve described thus far represent only the very
basic elements of stability work. They may seem simple, but they require a
great deal of focus; in my practice, we don’t even allow our patients to work
out with heavy loads until they work on these basic principles for at least six
months.
One more note: Trainers can be useful for some purposes, such as basic
instruction, accountability, and motivation, but we discourage patients from
becoming overly reliant on trainers to tell them exactly what to do every
single time they work out. I liken this to learning to swim in a wetsuit.
Initially, a wetsuit can help give someone confidence because of the additional
flotation it provides. But over the longer term, a wetsuit robs you of the need
to figure out your balance in the water. Balance is the real challenge with
swimming, because our center of mass is way off from our center of volume,
causing our hips to sink. Good swimmers learn to overcome this imbalance
with training. But if you never take off the wetsuit, you will never learn how
to fix this problem.
Similarly, trainers can be helpful in teaching you the basics of different
exercises, and to motivate you to get in the habit of working out. But if you
never learn to do the exercises on your own, or never try different ways of
doing them, you will never develop the proprioception needed to master your
ideal movement patterns. You will rob yourself of the learning progression
that is such an important part of stability training—the process of narrowing
the gap between what you think you are doing and what you are actually
doing.
Everything that we’ve covered in this last section serves two purposes: as
a drill, and as an assessment. I would urge you to film yourself working out
from time to time, to compare what you think you are doing to what you are
actually doing with your body. I do this daily—my phone on the tripod is one
of my most valuable pieces of equipment in the gym. I film my ten most
important sets each day and watch the video between sets, to compare what I
see to what I think I was doing. Over time, that gap has been narrowing.
—
It was really difficult, at first, to accept that I wasn’t going to be lifting heavy
weights anymore, but Beth and Michael Stromsness were persuasive. I
couldn’t even squat properly or perform a simple pull-up correctly, so doing
anything more than that would put me at risk of (further) injury.
I fumed over this for a while. How could I live without weight training? It
took several months of work, but eventually I had learned enough that I could
deadlift again. Where in the past I’d done four hundred pounds or more, now
Beth had me begin at just ninety-five pounds, which seemed like hardly any
weight at all.
It helped to recall something that my driving coach, Thomas Merrill,
often tells me. He is an incredible driver who in 2022 placed second in the
one of the most prestigious motor races in the world, the 24 Hours of Le
Mans; he knows what he’s talking about. One of his mantras is that in order
to go faster, you need to go slower.
Here’s what he means: when you “overdrive” a car, as when you’re trying
too hard to drive as fast as possible, you make mistakes. In driving, mistakes
compound. When you spin in turn 5, it’s because you probably missed the
apex in turn 2 and didn’t correct in turn 3. You need to slow down and get the
car in the right spot, and it’ll take care of the rest.
Slow down, go fast. It’s the same, I think, with learning stability.
Hip-Hingin