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 to see these knuckles. Now, if I switch to a chin-up, it's the same knuckle in question here,
but in this case I want to see it. I want to see the tops of them. Because the only way I could see
them is if I get the bar deep enough into my hand to be able to see them. If I can't see them and
they go out of view, and all I could see are these on the chin-up, now again I'm overloading, you can
see that overloading these distal tendons that are going to place all of that stress down here at the
elbow. So how do we do the next thing here? The next thing would be to decrease the influence of
this fourth finger from doing so much work. Well, I've shown this to you guys in the past, it works
like magic, okay? You take a band, if you have one, you wrap it around and you tie it around the
bar, right? This sets up two little pieces of the band like this. When you go to do your pull-ups,
you put your fourth and finger on top of the band like that, you take the other three fingers, you
put them on the bar. What this has done is this has shifted the focus to these three fingers to do
the majority of the work to grip that bar and pull you up. Because we've increased the distance here
and changed the [inaudible 07:21] relationship of these muscles, we've actually decreased their
contribution a little bit. We kind of deadened them a little bit in terms of how much they want
to dominate that. And if you try it yourself, you'll feel this right way. If you have elbow
pain, and you make this switch, and you're now pulling through here, you'll feel most of the work
is now being done here and that elbow pain that you were experiencing five seconds ago you won't
feel it anymore. Right, so you do them with two bands hanging off of the bar. Okay, you could do
the same thing when we do the chin, and you could grip them this way, again, and pull from there,
and that will even decrease the pain that you feel on a chin-up. But again, if you're really acute,
I would shift the weight from the chin-up at the time being. So with that being said, guys,
now I want to address finally the barbell, and show you a couple of things you want to do there.
All right, so now with the barbell work, this is the source of a lot of your gains and your
training. But again, if this is flared up, your grip is directly killing your gains because you
can't do as heavy a barbell work as you'd like to do because this is causing a big block to what
it is you're trying to accomplish. So again, we have a two-part strategy. Whenever you grip this
barbell, your goal should be to try to grip it as deeply into your palm as you possibly can. Now you
might be thinking that, Hey look, Jeff, you told me in the past like bend my wrist back when I do a
curl. It doesn't change the fact that you want to have the barbell deep. Because if we take it like
this, right, and we take the barbell-- I'll use my finger as the barbell-- and I place it deep in
the palm, and I grip around it. Even if I were to bend my wrist back, and the purpose of that
by the way is to sort of deaden the forearm from contributing too much and dominating a
bicep curl. Well, you can still see that if their barbell is sitting deep enough in the palm here,
that it's still resting directly over my forearm, which provides the support at that top. It's not
being carried all the way out here, which is not only going to overload those tendons, but it's
also going to place an inordinate amount of strain and stress on that muscle too, which could cause
some traction stress on that same point. Further problems, right? So you want to get that barbell
deep in your hand. But there's another thing you can do here. I had mentioned I would get
to it. You could switch momentarily to a hook grip. Now what the hook grip does, ironically,
is it actually takes the exact problem that you're having in loading these two fingers too much,
and it literally shifts all the load to these three fingers. So if you come around I'll show
you what we're talking about. The hook grip is not really a comfortable thing. It's something that
takes getting used to. But again, biomechanically it's the exact solution to the problem you're
having right now. And even if you get used to it, you might wind up sticking with it because it will
take away some of the risks that might come from having a mixed grip on a deadlift as the weight
gets heavier. So if we take our hand here, what you want to do is you want to go over the top,
but you want to dig it as far into this crevice as you possibly can. So you come all the way down.
Right, we're not just getting deep into the palm like we were talking about before, but now we're
getting really deep into here so that I can get that thumb across. Right, and the goal here is
that if I get that deep enough, these two fingers now are going to position themselves one over the
nail and one behind the knuckle, like that. Okay, and then we dig in. Now what's happened here just
by getting into this position is these two fingers have dramatically been decreased in terms of their
contribution to this grip. Everything is now being squeezed through here. And if you feel pain when
you do this it's likely because you're pressing on top of the knuckle. You don't want to be pressing
directly down on top of the knuckle. You could do that right now and you'll likely feel that it
kills. You want to be around that knuckle. Okay, one in front, one behind, you could squeeze this
as hard as you possibly can, it's not going to cause any discomfort right now. So when we get
in that position, again, now when I go and I grip, and I pull, whether I'm doing a row,
whether I'm doing a deadlift, whatever I'm doing, it's shifting the focus away from that ring finger
here that wants to dominate this movement and is giving you a reprieve-- maybe temporarily,
maybe forever-- from the overloaded stress that's causing all this elbow pain. And when you get rid
of the elbow pain, guys, then you're getting rid of that long term problem that is going to inhibit
your ability to make gains in the gym. Your heavier lifts are going to depend upon you having
the right grip. If you get this sorted out here, guys-- hopefully now with a few modifications--
these are the problematic exercises, now you have a way to get around them. Guys,
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