Are Hand Grips Bad For You?

With hand grips becoming incredibly more popular every day, especially with how cheap they’re getting, many people are wondering: are hand grips bad for you?

To put it simply, no, hand grips are not bad for you. Using them in moderation will only stand to get your grip stronger and provide other incredible benefits. The only way hand grips would be bad for you is if you’re way overusing them (ie: 500-600 reps a day) and not recovering properly.

Let’s go into this more, and answer the question once and for all, are hand grips bad for you?

Hand Grips Are Generally Good For You

For the most part, using hand grips in moderation won’t do anything bad for you. In fact, they will help you a lot!

I wrote a whole article detailing hand grip strengthening benefits already if you’re interested.

But overall, these things are good for increasing your grip strength, forearm muscle, and making you stronger.

Without needing to say, grip strength is incredibly important. From trying to impress some girl at the grocery store with how many bags you can carry at once to your car, to even helping you in things like working on your car.

Again however hand grips are generally good for you. There’s not really a downside to using them.

But, could hand grips be bad for you? How So?

Hand Grips Can Be Bad If You Use Them Excessively (800+ reps a day)

Hand grips can be bad if you use them excessively. And by ‘excessive’- I mean, excessive.

This isn’t using it 50-100 reps a day, this is like using it 800 reps a day.

And I’m not really sure how you would even get to 800 reps a day with the hand grip strengtheners as it would likely be too hard and take too much time.

Even then, you probably won’t even see problems. Your forearms are used constantly throughout the day. When it comes to things like typing, texting, opening doors, writing- your forearms are constantly used.

If you use the grip strengtheners, while they can put a ton of progressive overload on your arms, you’re not likely to have much damage.

However, you can put a lot of stress on your tendons. (Possible carpal tunnel)

Using the hand grip strengtheners can put a lot of stress on your tendons and metacarpals if you aren’t careful.

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome affects people that have their metacarpals irritated, damaged, or destroyed.

This is actually far more common than you think. From baseball players to video gamers, carpal tunnel syndrome actually affects a lot of people.

But it can actually happen if you overuse the grip strengtheners, this can put a lot of stress on your metacarpals or tendons. This can cause faster wear or even significant pain.

Strangely enough, the grip strengtheners help my carpal tunnel syndrome.

I have carpal tunnel syndrome from my years of profesional gaming and a bad biking accident that caused my wrist to break back in 8th grade.

Regardless, my carpal tunnel syndrome isn’t usually numbness. It’s mainly just pain, like really bad pain. I get really bad pain from typing for this website all day, unfortunately.

Strangely enough, using my hand grip strengthener helps get rid of some of the pain. I think it stretches out my forearm muscles in a different way, but your mileage may vary. Some people find it more painful, but for me it helps.

Proper Recovery Is Required To Avoid Injury

Don’t be the idiot that rips out the grip strengtheners, cranks out 800 reps a day, then doesn’t do anything to properly grow those muscles or let them recover.

As always, if you’re trying a tough program like Arnold’s Blueprint to Mass, you need to recover with enough calories and protein.

It’s no different when you’re trying to grow your grip strength and forearms. Your muscles need increased energy to grow and protein to regrow those muscles.

So, if you do 800 reps of these, then don’t eat anything all day- expect to be very sore. This is because your body has a ton of muscle that needs to be repaired, with no protein nor calories to repair it.

On the other hand, if you’re like me and do 500 reps with a combination of wrist curls, then eat 4,000 calories with 170g of protein, and sleep 9 hours, there won’t be any soreness. My body will be able to recover from it and grow the muscles to be stronger.

This means my forearms will look bigger too, a win-win.

Try This Dr. Levi Video If You Have Forearm Soreness

This is my go-to video if you ever have forearm soreness or pain. This doctor, Dr.Levi, specializes in easy stretches that any of us can do to easily relieve a ton of pain and soreness.

Moderation in ALL Things

No matter how crazy of a bodybuilder you are, I think you can agree that moderation in all things is good.

Instead of trying to crank out 1,000 reps of the grip strengtheners every day, keep it moderate.

So maybe do 100-200 reps a day if you want to be extreme. Space it out, do a fair weight, and eat/sleep correctly to recover.

Maybe don’t even do it everyday, maybe every other day. Keep it in moderation, and you’ll save yourself from injury and grow bigger.

And Don’t Do Anything STUPID!

When you look at the experts in grip training, they rarely get injured.

However, all of them will say that most of their injuries come from doing stupid things.

At one grip strength training competition, a competitor only had to raise a stone to a certain length. In order to look cooler, he went above the safety length and raised it two more inches. In that same movement, his forearm nearly snapped in half. Literally, the tendon and upper forearm muscle ripped in half.

So when it comes down to it, don’t do stupid things. Don’t max out your grip strengtheners and try to squeeze them as hard as you can over and over screaming at the top of your lungs until you finally complete one rep. Then try and do it over and over again while screaming over and over sweating for every single rep.

That’s the thing. Be smart and not stupid. You wouldn’t put 500 lbs on a bench press and try to desperately hit it rep after rep if you know it’s going to crush you.

So do the same thing here, be smart and treat it like it’s a normal lift in the gym, and don’t be stupid.

Conclusion of Are Hand Grips Bad For You

Truthfully, no. There’s not really a downside to using hand grips. Just use them in moderation, recover properly, and you’ll be just fine. Plus, they’re pretty cheap, so you’re not losing much by getting one.

If you find yourself having pain, use the videos linked above to help alleviate some of it!

Otherwise, get out there and get big!