5 Grip Strength Exercises Every Woman Over 40 Should Know

Cori Lefkowith, of “Strong At Every Age” shows us how:

It’s time to get a grip

Grip strength is associated with longevity, overall strength, and lower mortality risk.

That said, it’d be remiss of us to not mention that this is because it’s a proxy for broader physical function rather than something that directly causes these outcomes. If you train your grip and only your grip, then it will only lower your mortality risk pertaining to “having a stronger grip could have saved you from this accident” situations.

All the same, grip is often a weak point, and neglecting it can create exactly those “having a stronger grip could have saved you from this accident” situations that we just mentioned. In our everyday lives, it’s less likely to be about “how long can we hold on to this cliff-edge” and more likely to be about “this cast iron pan whose contents I’m trying to pour into something else is heavier than I thought and now I’m dropping it and now I’m trying to save it and now I spilled hot something on myself and now I moved too suddenly and now I’m dropping it entirely and now I’m slipping and now I’m falling and now I’m breaking a bone”

If you think that’s a very long sequence of events, please understand the whole sequence takes place in about one second flat.

So. What to do about it?

• Farmer’s carry: carry a weight in one or both hands while standing tall, keeping the weight off your legs and gripping with all your fingers. A unilateral carry additionally challenges your core’s ability to resist flexion and rotation, while a bilateral carry allows heavier loading and greater leg involvement.
• Bottoms-up carry: carry a kettlebell or dumbbell with the weight positioned awkwardly so you must grip tightly to stabilize it. Keep your elbow close to your side and engage your lat. This challenges grip strength and shoulder stability.
• Dead hangs and pull-up holds: hanging from a bar strengthens your grip, while unilateral hangs can train each hand separately. A top pull-up hold provides an additional grip challenge while helping develop pull-up strength. Assisted variations can reduce the load when needed.
• Planks with different grips: traditional finger-gripping planks strengthen the hands and wrists while also training the core. Back-of-hand planks and planks with the wrists in extension add wrist strength, mobility, and stability demands. These harder variations can be performed from your knees or an incline initially.
• Finger extensor exercise: place a rubber band or hair tie around the outside of your fingers and push your fingers outward against the resistance. This strengthens the finger extensors and counterbalances repeated gripping and finger flexion. If that’s too awkward, you can do it without resistance and simply do very large fast rep counts (e.g. do 100 as quickly as possible).

For most grip exercises, changing where the weight sits in your hand changes which parts of your grip are emphasized. You can use different dumbbell positions, bottoms-up variations, or a pinch grip to challenge your fingers and hand muscles in different ways—just like in life in general.

For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

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Take care!