Episode 175: Gonzo Grip Strength and Training Philosophy with Grip Strength Athlete Adam Glass

On today’s episode of the Flex Diet Podcast, my good friend Adam Glass and I talk about grip strength and training tactics that can help you increase your strength and overall performance. We also discuss the number one error we see people making all the time, and how you can easily avoid it.

Listen in to hear:

• [5:15] Narrowing down your priorities
• [9:30] How Adam warms up
• [14:55] Why knowing exactly what you want leads to better training
• [18:56] Adam’s experience with arm wrestling
• [25:23] Mike and Adam’s experience at a grip competition in Finland
• [34:32] Why training wrist and hand strength makes everything stronger
• [40:12] Why spring grippers won’t strengthen your grip
• [52:25] Tactics for training grip
• [56:21] Adam and Mike discuss their new product

Find Adam

• Instagram
• Bettergripstrength.com

Flex Diet Podcast Sponsor

This podcast is brought to you by the new product Adam and I developed for grip strength. Go to www.bettergripstrength.com to find out more.

Rock on!

Download the transcript

[00:00:00] Dr Mike T Nelson: Hey, welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast where we discuss all things to enable better body composition, strength, muscle and performance without costing your health and a flexible approach. Today, I’ve got an amazing podcast with my good friend, Adam Glass.

[00:00:21] You may know Adam from his crazy Instagram account where he’s doing some insane things that we get into in the podcast here such as a pull-ups from pinch. A block of bars. Pretty easy looking 45 pound plate curl. Walking around with a Thomas engine dumbbell in each hand for farmers walks. That was a little bit too easy. So now he’s working on doing that thumbless so all your thumb and fingers are on the same side, which is crazy hand and wrist strength.

[00:00:53] And we’re talking all about training principles today. And additionally, a new grip product that I am working on with Adam, where he’s going to break down a whole bunch of the concepts for you. As I’ve said before, If you have very poor tires on your car. It is limiting your performance because your tires are the interaction where the rubber meets the road.

[00:01:18] Your grips strength is the same aspect with all forms of training. Anytime you’re holding onto a barbell, a dumbbell. And an opponent, maybe you’re doing Brazilian jujitsu. You’re holding onto an implement such as tennis, golf, et cetera. What we both have found is that grip strength can be a limiter and your overall strength and performance.

[00:01:39] So while you, if you want to do high level grip competition, we talk about competing in Finland, both of us were over there. This is more or less geared towards other people who are not wanting to be a high level grip competitor, how these training tactics can help you increase your strength and just overall performance.

[00:02:02] The good part is you don’t have to dedicate hours per week to it. We also discussed the number one error that we see people making all the time. And how you can easily avoid that. So this podcast is brought to you by the new training product I’m doing with Adam Glass.

[00:02:20] If you’re on my newsletter insider list you will see all the information coming there. So make sure to check that out. If you are not, you can still get on it in time. Go to bettergripstrength.com. You will see a picture of Adam there. Hanging from one hand to doing a plate curl with a 45 pound plate. Just absolutely insane.

[00:02:44] So go to those two locations, we’ll have all the information in the notes below. We would love for you to be in on this product It’s going to be awesome and sit back and enjoy this conversation with Adam Glass

[00:03:01] [00:03:04] Dr Mike T Nelson: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast, and today I’m here with my good buddy Adam Glass. How’s it going man?

[00:03:12] Adam Glass: Man, it goes great. Thanks for having me on today.

[00:03:16] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, this’ll be fun.

[00:03:17] We’re gonna have a, I dunno, just a chat about some grip stuff and just general training wherever it goes. And I got to hang out your place with you and Ashley again for almost like five days on our way through Texas. So that was super fun. We did some interesting heavy dumbbell carries and lots of prowler work and Oh, it was fun and a twisted way

[00:03:41] Adam Glass: I, it’s funny. It’s amazing how it worked out that the hobby you’ve decided upon involves passing right by my house twice a year. So that has just worked out fantastically over this eight years, man.

[00:03:53] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, it’s been great cuz as of this recording I’m down here in South Padre, Texas and doing some kiteboarding, which has been good.

[00:04:00] Been able to get out like five times so far. Usually on different size kites that a 12, 13 and a half meter, 10 meter the other night. Yeah, and it’s been nice. So when we drive down, we go within an hour your place. It’s nice to stop by, see you guys for a while, get in some lifting and it’s also a good breakup of the entire trip.

[00:04:17] There’s people who, they’re crazy but they’ll drive it like straight through or over two days, like straight through. It’s 24 hours, which, ugh, maybe I’m getting old, but I don’t have any desire to drive for 24 hours in a row. That just sounds absolutely

[00:04:33] miserable.

[00:04:33] Adam Glass: And I understand the ones that do it cuz I used to drive that way, but I just, I don’t do it anymore.

[00:04:39] It feels like I’m in a big rush to get there and then for two days afterwards, one of my hips feels just completely stuck from being in that car. I definitely think it is a better deal that if you have the time to do to get there a little bit slower so that you feel great when you arrive.

[00:04:54] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. That’s the other part I noticed too. It’s like we used to drive, or especially when I was in school, I’d drive back and do some long drives and it’s Oh, okay, So yeah, maybe I got there in less time, but man, I felt destroyed for two days. I was like, Is it really that much farther ahead in the end?

[00:05:12] Eh, I dunno. I don’t think so. ,

[00:05:15] Adam Glass: I, I think that’s probably one of the more noticeable, one of those little things that you have where you talk about, you contrast when you’re in your twenties to forties.

[00:05:23] When I used to come up to Minnesota to see you guys, it would be really common that I would’ve 12 hour day in the field the day before, barely slept that night, got up at 4:00 AM started driving to get out to Minneapolis from Inot, which is about a 425 mile drive. Yeah. Take me seven to eight hours most of the time, and then pull up in a parking lot and 20 minutes later we’d start a lifting contest or something.

[00:05:49] There’s no freaking way you could get that kind of performance out of me right now, man. The mind is willing but there’s no way my body would tolerate that.

[00:05:58] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. That is the one thing I have noticed, I would say in general about being a little bit older. I’m 48 right now, which I don’t think is old.

[00:06:07] It’s like performance wise, like my lists that I’m working on are better now than they’ve ever been. Warm up wise, I’m definitely a lot better than I was at a certain point in my life, which was a Trashman fire at that point. But the ability that I have now to tolerate not moving for long periods of time and then go right into high levels of movement is definitely a lot lower.

[00:06:29] I just feel just gonna take a few more warmup sets, just takes a little longer to get going. And maybe part of that is just a higher level of awareness of the risk I’m running and I just don’t want to get injured in the gym. I, that’s so low on my list and, shit’s gonna happen and things are gonna happen at that time, but I feel like if I just take a few more warm upsets that everything just feels better overall.

[00:06:54] Adam Glass: I totally agree. And I think that really is the keen insight that, that knowledge in the back of your head that, man, look, this is all for fun. I’m not, I’m really not trying to get hurt today. Just screwing around. So maybe it will add a little 20 minutes here to what we’re, whatever we’re gonna do.

[00:07:10] I think that’s I think that’s one of the more interesting elements that comes about when you look at all of your feedback markers, things like HRV and such. A good day does not necessarily mean the session is gonna start off amazing at times. Correct. And I think it, it really, it, there really is something to people figuring out whatever that right combination of their warmup ritual is.

[00:07:36] And at the end of the day there’s, you see so many trainers bashing all the kinds of warmup things, and I get it because they’re looking at it from the sense. How much impact this particular thing would make versus another. But there really is something to a given person figuring out what is that pattern of spinning the dial to unlock, for me, like my, the three things I do the most in my warmups, I would bet most people would look at that and think that was a pretty stupid waste of time. But I can show you on a piece of paper, Okay. All the sessions where I start this way goes in this direction. And the ones that I don’t do those things, it just does not go as well.

[00:08:20] If, for me, the funniest one is, for a couple months now, I’ve been starting all of my, If I’m gonna be doing resistance training that day with a fat bar, overhand, reverse. and that doesn’t really seem like that great of a warmup choice. It’s not like you’re moving around all that much. But the big thing that happens is within the first seven or eight reps of the first set, I will get four or five very relaxing feeling releases throughout my left arm.

[00:08:49] There’ll be several popping sensations, and then you’ll see an instant change in how much my shoulders move, how much my elbow how easily it’s flexing, extending all these different things. So it’s funny because, man, for most people, I would not say that with this precious amount of time, you have to train, we need to do 10 minutes of something.

[00:09:09] So specifically small, but holy shit. For me, it makes a massive.

[00:09:15] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And I bet most people watching you would be like, Oh, he’s doing some super advanced pre-fatiguing of the muscle. And it’s No, I’m just trying to move better , man.

[00:09:25] I am just trying to get this elbow feeling great. What are the other two things you do?

[00:09:30] Adam Glass: The other two. So if I’m going to be doing pullups, what has been surprisingly useful to me is I will take several of those those elastic tubular cables. You can, you could probably buy ’em at any sporting good store in America, the ones that have a little clip at the end. Yep. They’re colored.

[00:09:50] I’ll throw a couple over the pull up bar, four or five of ’em, I will bind them just all up in my hand and all I’m doing is bringing my elbow right down into my hip socket and depressing my scap. So you’ll get this really strong contraction through the upper back. And I’ll just hold that position for 15, 20 seconds.

[00:10:12] And I’ll go back and forth a couple times. And the same thing to me, when I look at what I’m doing, it’s this looks dumb , but what has happened? I resumed a little personal quest. I had this thing in my mind that I wanted to hit 20 pinch pullups by New Year on my blocks.

[00:10:28] So Mike, previously, if we go back to years past, if we go back to, like, when I had the gym in Minnesota, I would do sets of three to five reps on the pinch pull up. And sometimes I would add weight, but it was staying right in that very small rep range. And when I started doing a lot of calistenics about eight years ago, I had that stretch of time that the, all I did was body weight.

[00:10:53] The best I ever did was 14 consecutive reps weighing about 191 pounds. Right now I weigh 2 27 and I’m getting sets of 15 to 18 reps. Nice. So that, that’s like a pretty ridiculous change, especially because the limiting factor on that whole motion is in my fingertips. , and it’s been little man, little things that you’d think would not make any kind of difference for me specifically.

[00:11:19] That’s been a very useful thing. It’s not that I think that would necessarily be all that useful to anybody else, but what I would want them to do is hear that story and ask themselves, what do I need to be doing to feel better as I’m starting this session? Because generally speaking, you’re just not gonna have great days if you can’t get to that feeling.

[00:11:41] Better point. And there’s a huge power to be able to look down at the calendar and say, Okay, hey, I trained 12 times this month. But out of the 12, 11 of those were really good sessions. I felt really good starting, I felt really good finishing. I think that adds up to a much better year then, I’ve had previous years where my training average would be four and five days a week.

[00:12:04] And there it becomes a part of a grind with the big thing being and those of you that are doing a training like this, you already know what I’m gonna say. If you’re gonna train five days a week, what you’re really doing probably is you’re having two pretty decent training sessions a week, and you’re probably having two or three sessions that they’re probably not that great.

[00:12:26] It, it might be more for your psychological benefit than anything else. It’s just, it’s really a challenge to actually do the right kind of work in more than a couple of things, but then come back and do that day after day. Man, for me, in previous years I was a big advocate of people training more or less as often as they could stand to with the thing that I was focused on, there was their psychological benefit.

[00:12:52] I just think that it’s gonna de-stress them. It’s gonna give them a way to output the, just man, all the things that come with being in this modern world. And for me now, a lot of it is shifted to where, man, I’m really just trying to knock out some big PRS on days that I do train. So if I can only get in two awesome sessions twice a week, that is perfectly fine.

[00:13:11] I’ve outgrown that need to try to lift the things every single day.

[00:13:18] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And I think that speaks to now two things that. Psychological versus the physiological thing. Like I’ve had some clients more so in the past where the conversation has been, Okay, that’s cool. If for your psychological health, if you feel like you need to go to the gym and do something that’s absolutely brutal so you can make it through your day.

[00:13:39] Cool. I get it. Just be aware that’s what you’re doing. Maybe we’ll transition you to something that just doesn’t beat you up so bad. Like I can think of all sorts of heinous things you can do that you could probably come back in and do ’em again a couple days later that are hard, but don’t have a lot of eccentric stress, they’re not gonna mechanically damage you as much.

[00:13:59] And then you know, quality over quantity. And I think that’s, people training in most commercial gyms and even the people who show up there a lot, like back when I used to do that more often, I wouldn’t say that a lot of their sessions were that high equality. They were going through the motions, poking around on their phone between sets, like just.

[00:14:18] It didn’t seem like their performance ever got better. And again, maybe they’re training for psychological reasons, who knows? But yeah, I think having the quality be high first and then if you want to add more quantity is much better than, an arbitrary number of, Oh, I train five days a week, so I must be better.

[00:14:38] It’s no not necessarily .

[00:14:40] Oh, and it could be a disappointing tally at the end of a stretch of time when you take that mentality that obviously I’m gonna do better this round because I’m training more often. Maybe that could be, but it probably is not gonna, it’s just probably not gonna go that way.

[00:14:55] Adam Glass: So I, Mike, for me, when I was doing a lot of gymnastics, daily training was really simple. It, it made a lot of sense doing that. . When I came back out of that in 2018 to resume competition, I think that’s when it started to really get my attention how unproductive it is to have these sessions where I did go knock out seven or eight lifts and even saw some really good improvements that day.

[00:15:23] But I, at the I’m looking at this calendar saying, I gotta be ready on this day. And you go back and evaluate. It’s okay, out of the last 90 days, I’ve prd in all these lifts. I’ve moved up in all these different ways, but my competition lifts, What do those actually look like?

[00:15:40] And, they weren’t moving at the rate that I wanted to. They were good enough to be dominant, but I just had it in my mind that I could go further and that was what I kept coming back to. And I think that’s, If I compare this last couple years of competition to the previous block years back so much remarkably better performances in the last few years with it being getting very specific on what I want.

[00:16:07] Cause a lot of people when we say things like, Oh hey, I wanna get stronger and I wanna look better and I wanna feel better. Yeah, those are all awesome and we all want those things, but you have to take that so much more specific. I think about if if Ashley and I, and Jody and you are in the car and we’re heading towards Fort Worth and we all agree, we’re hungry and we all agree, good food is what we want.

[00:16:32] We’re only one step closer to a many step decision, right? okay, we’re all hungry, that’s great and we all want some good food, but what do you want? And I think that a lot of people are gonna have much, much better results the more that they can sift through all that and really get to whatever it is that is meaningful for them.

[00:16:54] Because it’s interesting when you look at how much a person can achieve in a year with even the most basic program, two people run that program. They have similar results. One of them can be over the moon, ecstatic, and the other one can be incredibly disappointed. And you look at why is that?

[00:17:12] It comes down to what do they want? And I feel like that’s been my most productive shift over this year with some of the new things I’ve done, is just really getting it dialed in. Man, what am I actually trying to accomplish here? Like hyper specifically, can I articulate it in a sentence? So that I actually can chase it in a way where we’ll really catch it this year.

[00:17:33] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And I think that comes down to, like you said, specificity. And, with clients, I’m always like, Okay, what are your top three goals? What is your number one obstacle? And if those goals change, that’s cool. But if you don’t know that, it’s if you just want to get in your car and drive and you don’t care what, where you end up, then it doesn’t matter.

[00:17:51] But if you’re, if I’m trying to get in our car and we’re trying to drive to Texas, then well, shit I should probably start going south , or otherwise it’s gonna be, a disaster. And you even for me being down here, it’s like I know that overall my number one goal is more related to kite boarding than it is actually lifting, which doesn’t mean I don’t lift or not working on any other goals after.

[00:18:12] But when I’m down here, it makes it a very easy decision. It’s Oh, okay, I’ve got two hours today. Is there wind? Oh, there is. Okay, so I’m gonna go kiteboard even if that means not going to the gym. So I didn’t, yesterday, two days ago was the first day I went to the gym since I’ve been here, I’ve been able to ride like five days.

[00:18:28] So if my goal was, a certain lift at all costs, then yeah, I would probably do the inverse of that decision. And neither one is right or wrong, it’s just what does that person want to do? Cause you see people set up goals that are then completely incongruent with their lifestyle and it’s I wanna be in an Olympic weightlift champion.

[00:18:48] Okay. But I can only train twice a week. Okay. Eh, good luck with that. That might be pretty difficult to pull off . Yes.

[00:18:56] Adam Glass: I’ll tell you what I have discovered that, so a couple years ago I had some of the arm wrestlers in the area reach out. They were real excited for me to just try out their sport.

[00:19:05] I think a lot of them were just trying to figure out okay, if that guy’s hands are like this, what is he like on the arm wrestling table? And man, I, I really enjoy the community. I’ve met so many just really fantastic people, but I will tell you what I’m discovering with it. In order to make arm wrestling work, I have to be prepared to travel not super duper far.

[00:19:29] And there’s people who probably travel much farther than this every time they go to practice. But the thing that I’m realizing is I don’t like the travel part. So there are days where, man, if I would be willing it say 7:00 PM to drive all the way across the metroplex, out from west of Fort Worth into the center of Dallas, I can be in a room with some of the very best people in the state to train.

[00:19:51] I’m just finding that man, maybe it’s not really the thing that I’m chasing, cuz you would assume that if I really wanted to do this, the driving would just be part of the deal and I would be into it. And I’ve kinda find it, I’m not into that part so much . So I don’t predict any great outcomes from my arm wrestling adventures primarily because it is, it has been, of all the strength sports I’ve ever played, it has been the very hardest one I have ever seen to learn to balance the recovery elements of it.

[00:20:22] And it’s because there’s no comparable okay, You might remember this dude in 2011, I set off on the whole 20 rep squat program kind of deal. Oh yeah, I remember that. Remember that? I was like, I keep seeing all these people are always saying that if you really wanna see a lot of gains, you gotta do this kind of thing, blah, blah, blah.

[00:20:43] So I had months and months of doing 20 plus reps, sets of squats. Obviously my squat went up a ton. I did gain weight. I think my heaviest I got up to then was like 2 35. It definitely made me bigger and I remember that after that first month or two, it made a lot of sense to me on a given day, Okay, I’m gonna go do this kind of set today that, and this is what it’s gonna cost.

[00:21:09] With arm wrestling it is, it becomes so unpredictable because you’re responding to a human being, number one. But the other thing is you’re just loading your body with so much tension in positions that you never would do. There’s no other sport I see where you have this kind of forces applied to such small bones and structures.

[00:21:34] There are guys that the amount of pressure they can put into your hand or into your wrist or on, right on top of your bicep tendon you couldn’t even do that to yourself in a gym. You’d never figure it out. And in fact, that’s one of the biggest challenges that a lot of people have is how do I actually train up for the sport?

[00:21:51] And you see a lot of different results and you a huge spread that is, is not so easily deciphered. And for me it has been man, super fun, but a nightmare in figuring out like, Dude, how do I keep any kind of balance to my body with this? And not just end up another one of the guys who mo most arm wrestlers have pretty ferocious tendonitis most of the year.

[00:22:13] Oh yeah. And that, everyone’s gonna tell you that’s part of playing the game. And, hey dude, if you’re a marathon runner, you’re gonna have some beat up feet. Everybody knows that. But the thing about it for me is, And I don’t, I do not wanna do 365 days a year with elbow pain just so that maybe five times a year I can show up And dude pulling a tournament bracket, most of your matches are over in six seconds.

[00:22:38] Oof. So you get to the tournament, you weigh in, you hang out, you watch the matches. When your bracket comes up, your bracket will come and go in minutes and you might pull four or five rounds. That does not even add up to 30 seconds of work for the day. And then that was the whole deal. So when you when you evaluate it by how am I gonna feel all the time in order to feel a certain way and is very specific, tiny amount of time, I’m finding my heart’s not in it as much as I would’ve thought it would’ve been if you would’ve asked me years ago, but very enjoyable activity especially when you’re just figuring it out cuz it is far more complex than someone would assume.

[00:23:19] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And I think that’s a very advanced decision, right? Cuz you’re looking at, here’s the pros, here’s the cons, and then I’m actually going to evaluate what I’m actually doing related to those things, right? And I think that’s where people go wrong. They’re like, I wanna do X and I’m gonna dedicate Y to it.

[00:23:39] And you’re like, Oh, that’s cool. Given, the opportunities were there. So if it’s arm wrestling, there’s, a place you can compete or practice, et cetera, How many times did you show up to potentially do the thing? And they’re like I just didn’t make it out. I understand life happens, things happen.

[00:23:53] But if it’s something you were really committed to and it was your top priority, you probably would’ve followed through with that. Where I think a lot of times people fall into the trap of, eh, this was of a goal I think everyone else wanted for me to do, but I didn’t really wanna do it, but.

[00:24:11] I don’t really wanna admit that, but I haven’t really done the thing. And then they feel bad. They’re not making progress. But I’m like, you, how do you expect to make progress when you didn’t practice the thing ?

[00:24:21] Adam Glass: And we used to see that quite a bit. We would have sport days at the gym, so we would open it up.

[00:24:26] You, got all these people they signed on because they’re looking to have some aesthetic changes. The great majority of those people said, I know I need to change our meeting and I would like to look a different way. Cool, let’s do it. And we would throw ’em into those things and, it would be, some people really enjoy that sports side and some people absolutely despise it.

[00:24:50] And we had some people that would make themself do it. It’s one of those life experience things. Be able to command yourself on a spot. Yeah. But I think it, it becomes pretty obvious. The people that just, Oh, I don’t think this activity’s gonna be for you. Maybe it’s, but you don’t seem to be enjoying yourself so much, so maybe we need to find something else for you.

[00:25:09] On that note guys, for those of you that listen to this podcast often with Dr. Mike, so you might not know this, but Michael has done more types of lifting contests than almost anyone I know. There would be months that Mike would come up to the gym and we’d do a grip contest on this Saturday.

[00:25:30] He’d come back next Saturday. We would’ve had a tactical strength challenge come back the next weekend. We had a all around weightlifting meet. Mike, I would have to imagine that if we looked at some of the records and scoreboards, you’ve probably competed in, I don’t know, 20 different grip contests over the last 10 years, which is about 20 more than most people who do the same thing you.

[00:25:53] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And it’s been fun and you do something long enough, you can even get a chance to compete in it in Finland by just hanging out at the Arnold and being in the right spot. And I remember so Arto was there, huge, massive top lifter from Finland. Adam was there. You guys were competing at the Arnold.

[00:26:12] I think I probably told this story before. And Artos telling Adam, he’s Hey, Adam, don’t do worlds in Russia. You come lift with us in Finland. And Adam’s Oh, that, that sounds cool. And I was telling Arto Jody was there too. I said, Hey we’ll, know, we’ll come over and watch. That would be fun.

[00:26:26] We love going to Finland. Artos like you, you should compete. And then Adam was saying, you were saying, I’ve done, grip competitions and stuff before, and I was telling Arto, I’m like, But Arto you need a special invite to come to these things. It’s not just a, grip is a huge thing in Finland and Arto is so funny.

[00:26:43] He’s like special invite. I give you a special invite, You come compete . I’ll take and we did

[00:26:49] Adam Glass: construction experience and the biggest cultural difference that, that I saw related to that. So guys the venue that we lifted at when we were there was at a resort. Beautiful hotel up on a mountain up on a hill.

[00:27:05] Yeah. That looks down into this valley where you have this beautiful lake. Just, when you guys here it’s northern Europe. It looks the way you’re imagining big, huge green trees, right? And this contest is happening all through the day. It got going in the morning, there were tons of competitors.

[00:27:22] I think they had almost 60 or 70 lifters. So it takes a certain process of time. And the thing that I saw there that I’ve never seen anywhere else, the families that were at the resort, Would just stroll into the room that the lifting was happening, would sit down and grab a table, order a beer, and would watch the lifters.

[00:27:44] And they didn’t know any of the people. No, that was amazing. It wasn’t the family of various lifters. I was there, there were other families on vacation. It’s just in their culture, they really love lifting sports and they have no problem coming up off the beach from the lake to go sit down in a room and watch a bunch of guys yell and scream and try to lift 50 pounds on his tiny little thing.

[00:28:11] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, that was super fun. And I think it’s always, it goes back to if you get presented sometimes with opportunities, you just have to figure out a way to make it happen, and at the time, I, competed in your class against you and all the other lifters, but I’m like, eh, Whatever.

[00:28:26] Who else can say that? You competed at a international event in Finland and everyone was super fun. Most of them are incredibly autistic, which is even more hilarious and fun.

[00:28:38] Adam Glass: whole room. The whole room.

[00:28:40] Dr Mike T Nelson: Explain that to people who are listening. Cause they might think that’s insulting, but it’s not an insult at all, actually.

[00:28:46] Adam Glass: Okay I’ll tell you this. And for those of you that have never been around a really high level tier of a strength sport, this might not make sense, but it’s absolutely true. If you look at strong man power lifting things like grip sport some of the weirder things that come out of that, things from the kettlebell community.

[00:29:03] I will tell you almost every top lifter I’ve ever met would be somewhere on the diagnosable spectrum of autism. And it looks to me like the reason that you see this big jump in performance at the top 2% from the bottom 98, it deals with what the person thinks is fun. So for me, it is perfectly fun to go out into my garage on a cold, rainy day and try to pick up these stupid weights that most people don’t even wanna mess with

[00:29:37] And when you go to the highest level competitions you realize that wow, okay, so that’s the secret sauce for this whole sport. And it’s that ability to just have this unyielding focus towards things that, generally speaking are not super fast progress. For a lot of people out there, if you have not been deadlifting and somebody gets you going you’re deadlifting the right way and you’re following any of the many proven formulas for how to do it week by week.

[00:30:06] It wouldn’t be unrealistic to expect that at the end of a year you may have put on 150 pounds from the first day you lifted on the bar, yeah, totally. Maybe day one you started and you could pull two 50 and that was tough. And 2 75, you’re a little scared. It very easy. It could be at the end of year one, you’re pulling 400 pounds very easily.

[00:30:25] When you look at the change, when you go to my sport, if we test it out, something like, and we’ll use the big lift like your overhand fat bar, which for most people that’ll be the most weight they lift in this kind of sport, man. A year of hard dedicated work, you might only put on 15 pounds. Yeah.

[00:30:46] And the thing about it is the limit. Your hips will be way stronger, your back will be stronger, you will be more muscular at the end of that year. But the limitation that is stopping you from putting on weight is three small joints in your hand. Because the thumb is such a limitation there, a five year program that’s super productive might only actually put on 50 pounds on a given guy’s lift.

[00:31:11] And Mike, that’s pretty common. If we look at guys that get started in arm lifting if we look at a guy who started in 2018, for example, and we look at his overhand axle numbers today, I would be probably shocked if their number from 2018 to 2022 was more than 40 pounds.

[00:31:32] Dr Mike T Nelson: About 10 pounds a year, I think is

[00:31:33] pretty damn good.

[00:31:34] Adam Glass: That’s and I can point out three guys that I can specifically tell you that. So I know that in 2018 we had a meet in Fort Worth. Tanner Merkel came out that day and got 4 0 5 I lifted I think 4 22. And that year in California, Carl Myers coff was getting like four 80, which is insane. You go to 2020, you go to 2022.

[00:32:01] Carl is now getting about five 10 to five 15. I’m getting between four 50 and four 60. Tanner’s getting between 450, 4 60. So there’s three lifters right there that they put on less than 50 or 60 pounds of four years. And that is chasing hard. I, I just don’t, I just don’t think the kind of person who is Very much into novel and very much into, show me something fun today.

[00:32:30] I think it’d be a very hard sport for them to progress in. I think they’d have a lot of fun at meets, especially cuz there’s people there, but the actual day in, day out training for the sports side you probably gotta be a little autistic to actually go somewhere with it. Cuz there’s gonna be a lot of times that you are not progressing anywhere near the rate that you would be if you were just say, back squatting and doing deadlift of a mixed script.

[00:32:57] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And I’ve noticed too that it’s, the longer you do it, the more non-linear it becomes. Yeah. And the more you may have to paradoxically move around to other lifts. And so like for me, like I’ll trade off and this is directly from your advice too, between axle and saxon bar as the higher priority.

[00:33:22] When my axle just stalls out, there’s are variations I’ll still work on, but I’ve learned that if I work on a Saxon bar, which is an overhand pinch grip, which we’ll get into, when that goes up, that’ll almost always transfer back to my axle. So I go back and I do more axle work. Boom. My axle goes up and I go back and do more Saxon work.

[00:33:40] I’m still working on both of ’em, usually at around the same time. But going back to, our priority, I’ll take a period of time and one of them will be a higher priority, which just means I do it earlier in the session. I probably push frequency a little bit more. But even on a Saxon bar, you’re talking about, even a little bit less progress.

[00:33:57] I pulled 1 65 in March for a fugly looking single and before I left to come down here, so middle of October, I got what, 175 for a triple, I think. So it’s oh. 10 pounds, maybe a little bit over, depending upon my max. And I was pretty happy with that, so it’s very small, integral changes over time.

[00:34:25] And as you do it more, there’s more kind of variability within that if you’re just looking from day to day one to the next.

[00:34:32] Adam Glass: There’s a couple of insights I will share of people too that I think will help them out. So for most people, if we can get you to add more training of your wrist and hands, it’s going to help out whatever else you’re doing.

[00:34:48] Now, obviously there’s a point of diminishing returns there. If you’re a baseball player, I don’t want you to be spending 20% of your time training your hands, but if I could get you to maybe spend five, we can get something done. And the number one change that I think a lot of people who are not really chasing it in some of the different ways that maybe you or I’ve done would benefit from.

[00:35:10] So Mike, a lot of people when they see grip training, they do understand, okay, I probably should do something for my hands cuz I’m not doing anything with it. But the problem is a lot of people are focusing on relatively too low intensity and they’re doing holds. Yep. And the problem with that is most of the time holding something lightweight is just not, it’s not gonna translate the way that, that you’d want it to later.

[00:35:40] So I know people that are in the gym now and their trainers got ’em doing things like their farmers walking around three 10 pound dumbbells, three 10 pound plates and hand in a pinch. First of all, kudos because you are now engaging that wrist and that some the way we want. But when we compare how much weight your body actually could move,

[00:36:01] And if we looking at, on a scale of intensity, if you’re only farmers walking three plates a day, you’ll probably only be farmers walking three plates in three months from now. Yeah. . I think there’s too much of an emphasis on holding things and the part I I understand why people arrive at that conclusion cuz you look at a sport like rock climbing, climbers, most climbers, if you ask ’em how they do, a lot of their specific hand training they’re doing holds.

[00:36:28] Yep. Five seconds, eight seconds, but pay attention to how much resistance they’re actually using. So yeah, they’re doing eight second holds and you’re doing eight second holds. But this guy is putting all of his body weight onto the tip of his index and middle finger, and he is just hanging there with the tiniest amount of contact in a crimp for five seconds.

[00:36:52] The loading on that is extraordinary. . And I think that’s probably the error that a lot of people make is maybe it might be that they just don’t know what to do and they’re doing too many garbage reps of too much lightweight. And I would flip that equation on its head. Like for most the people out there, if you’re now, you either are one of two people, you’re either a dead lifter who says, My pull would go better if my hand was stronger category one or you’re category two and you’re saying, No, my grip’s good.

[00:37:23] That’s not why I’m missing reps. Okay. If you’re in the first bracket, the kind of grip work I would have you do would be the same kind of thing. You’re probably already doing singles, triples. I I don’t need you to take what’s already working for you and go to sets of 15 or something that maybe that has not been working for you.

[00:37:45] I would have you stick to what you know, and let’s just change the contact point. And for a lot of people, the best investment, if you’re just a, if you’re just a guy who, a guy or gal and you just love to lift and you wanna get more performance to safety, get a set of fat grips and use them in a programmed way, no different than you do your other barbell lifts.

[00:38:06] So when the fat grips go on the bar, the biggest change is the amount of weight that you’re gonna lift is gonna go down. But the scheme of your lifting really should be about the same. So if you already know that, you respond really well to, to solid triples, do solid triples, but now you got the fat grips on the bar overhand.

[00:38:27] Yes. And the real change as well, that there’ll be fewer plates, but you’ll feel it quite a bit when you take that fat grip off and grab that bar.

[00:38:36] Yeah, I think that’s so key because the first part of the conversation we’re talking about, , if you are specifically training for a grip sport competition, which is different than training grip.

[00:38:50] To see a positive transfer. To just be stronger overall. So for the second category, which is what you were talking about there, a lot of people I see that their hands and fingers are the limiter. And if they are the limiter, that generally means they haven’t done a whole lot of specific work for it.

[00:39:09] They’re not looking to compete in grip sport if they want to. That’s great. They’re just looking for the transfer to get stronger, like you said in the deadlift. And so for that category, I find exactly what you said is that you don’t need a lot of hyper specific work. You don’t need to spend hours upon hours doing it.

[00:39:29] Dr Mike T Nelson: And I love your tip of, just take fat grips, put ’em on the bar, double over hand, do some deadlifts in that position because now you’ve taken. A lift where you can already move an appreciable amount of load and you’ve just put the stress more on your grip as the limiting factor of that lift.

[00:39:50] And therefore you’re training it specifically to transfer to your deadlift, but you’re not, For example, I see people, Oh, I wanna train my grips so I’m gonna go by and just close a bunch of grippers for a while. Rarely have I, I dunno, I have hardly ever seen that transfer. Or I think just getting a pair of fat grips, you’re gonna be miles ahead.

[00:40:12] Adam Glass: So the phenomenon of the torsion spring gripper. Yep. So Mike, I remember when I was probably 15 or 16 years old, it was on the back pages of a issue of Iron Man magazine. Yeah, the Ivanka Super gripper. Yep. It was a big green monstrosity with these springs on it. And the thing about it is the advertising was really clever.

[00:40:37] because they showed this guy’s forearm and I’m betting it was like Lee Priest . It was somebody that had a very short forearm that was exceptionally muscular. Yeah. And they’re saying that, Hey, if you were squeezing this thing, your arm would look more like this arm. And I’m gonna tell you right now, I know of the top 10 strongest of all time gripper closes.

[00:41:04] I per there on my phone is seven of them. We all laugh because none of the guys that can close, like the famous captain of crush number four gripper, which would just feel like a brick to most people insane. Their arms never look like that advertisement. , no moving your hand in that motion is not going to build up your hand in form the way that you might think.

[00:41:25] So right off the bat, if your training focuses aesthetics, And you’re thinking of adding in some hand training. I’m gonna tell you now, closing the gripper will not change the quality of muscle in how it appears in your arms. I promise that. The other problem with it though, is that it is such a hyper specific thing.

[00:41:47] Like a, if a guy is an awesome baseball player, it does not mean he’ll be an awesome golfer. Yes. two look pretty similar in some ways, but no, they don’t equal out at all. And in that way here’s the deal of grippers guys. If you are someone who thinks that, that is cool, if that whole idea of being able to pick up one of these things and man, it just feels like it would never even move and now you can close it and that is satisfying.

[00:42:11] Cool. Keep doing it. Just don’t expect that to necessarily show up anywhere. It’s funny, in the USA right now, one of the best gripper closes ever is a 19 year old in Chicago. Oh, wow. He can close these grippers in just unbelievable power Right now when you look at his all around hand strengths, definitely above average.

[00:42:34] Absolutely. But there’s this thing where you’d expect that if I told you that guy can close the number four gripper, you would probably anticipate that he can do so many things and it’s just not that we, it’s just not the case. So for most people, I think hand grippers are in amusing distraction at best and can become a terribly unproductive detour, including, there’s some injuries you can get from ’em.

[00:43:02] They’re not, they’re dangerous because they push. Yep. So it’s they’re fighting you the whole way and it is easy to hurt yourself with them if you don’t know what you’re doing

[00:43:13] Dr Mike T Nelson: or if you’re like Adam and you exert too much force on ’em and break ’em, that can mess you up too.

[00:43:24] Adam Glass: There was a gripper that I got from Europe guys and it had a very different setup from the ones you’ve probably seen and it had a screw in a bolt holding the center line together. I put so many reps on this thing over a period of about two years that there was, the day I was in the gym setting it at a stupid high level and I broke the weld that held the leg on cuz it was binding up and that had snapped a tendon on the top of my wrist.

[00:43:52] And it took about eight months to even get back to being feeling strong on its side. And I have not really messed up grippers too much after 2012 for that reason. I can still pick up a number three and close it, but I won’t, you won’t see anything more than that from me on it. I just, I, to me there it’s like paying a hundred percent for 1% return.

[00:44:15] , there’s just you’re not getting a full body training effect. It is extremely draining on the nervous system to be able to mess with these heavy grippers. And man, at the end of the day, most people end up, you either go one or two directions, you own a few of them, or you own a ton of them.

[00:44:32] And when you own of them, you probably own too many that are too easy. And then you own too many that are too hard and you’re really only working on one or two of ’em at a time. And for the people that are into that’s great. But to me it is a terrible starting place. If you’re just thinking, I really need to make my hands and fingers stronger.

[00:44:54] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And the only time I trained them is when you had it as part of your grip competitions there, and I just trained it so it wasn’t completely horrible and I didn’t see hardly any transfer from it. I actually, towards the end I stopped training them because it was, at least for me, a little bit annoying.

[00:45:12] It was a little bit draining. And then people also forget to, to actually set a gripper properly. There’s more technique involved in it than most people would realize. It becomes very, on the high end, very technical, just to get it into that starting position on top of everything else. Oh yes.

[00:45:32] Adam Glass: The tiniest deviation from that perfect position can turn something that you can do three reps with into not even doing.

[00:45:41] And the reason I took ’em outta my contest after a while was it became too frustrating to watch. Yeah. People show up that were really performing well in, the overhand lifts and the heavy one hand lifts, and you could tell that person had some power, then you hand them a gripper, which they have not messed with before, and they’re missing their attempts a hundred percent because of the positioning of the apparatus.

[00:46:08] And, the thing is this is because the set is part of the close that makes it part of the deal. But what I found with it by looking at numbers, Mike, from just the number of people we had come through, whoever closed the biggest gripper that day had little impact on who won the event. Yes. Out of, I don’t even know how many contests I’ve hosted now.

[00:46:29] It’s probably towards a hundred. and some lifts were indicative of who’s gonna win and who’s not. And some lifts were just crazy. And the grippers was the event that you could take it out of the scorecard almost every time in the ranking didn’t change. And I think that’s important, when you’re finding an event that’s not actually changing how the pack is split up it tells me from a competitive point of view of ranking, maybe this is the wrong event. I really wanna see that every event allows the final placing to be impacted. Which that’s just a function of looking at enough variables.

[00:47:10] And I think that’s the wrong one. And I’ll tell you guys, so here’s the other thing that comes with grippers that I just have to address on this call real quick. The most common behavior of people who get into grippers is they buy a gripper. And they put it in their car and they get in this idea of things like, Okay, when I stop at a red light, I’m gonna do three or four reps.

[00:47:33] That is a very risky behavior because you’re not appreciating the tolls taking on your body. Who if max back squat, say 405 you would probably not decide that. You know about every hour you’re gonna walk out to your weight stand and try to dunk 405, 3 or four times. You wouldn’t do that.

[00:47:57] You’d warm up you’d have the date plan you’d certainly wouldn’t be trying to do that, say 15, 17 times in the last two days. So the way that a lot of people engage in it is gonna become counterproductive cuz they’re basically gonna dig themselves into such a hole. If you wanna make it work, what will work better?

[00:48:17] Is, you’re really only gonna be picking up that gripper about once a week and you’re only gonna be doing a couple of attempts and you just gotta understand the spring tension is so high that you are doing enough work to flip that switch and get some progress. It, you certainly do not need to be doing so many reps upon so many reps with it.

[00:48:42] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. It’s almost like the convenience of it works against it. And I get people who market grippers to the general population like we were talking about. It’s, Oh, you can bring it anywhere, you can start this and look at this arm. This is impressive. And from a marketing standpoint it’s almost like too easy, but in practice.

[00:49:03] Yeah. It’s just, I don’t know. I’m at the point now where I’m sure you’ve had this conversation way more than I have. You find out, you do grip stuff, people come up to you and go, Hey man, I just bought this gripper. And they show you how they said it and they’re doing all sorts of stuff, and you’re just like, Oh no, not another one.

[00:49:22] Adam Glass: It’s I’ll tell you what the eye, the, when the little light bulb goes on in a lot of the guys, I’ll tell you what I see a level of disappointment that, that they realize how much of it is technique. .

[00:49:32] Oh, yeah. Especially when they’re shown the right technique the first time, they’re like, Oh shit,

[00:49:37] It just, it completely strips away the mystique that this is, this, man the, the people who could close this are bad asses. Hey, they are, they totally are absolutely sure but what they also are is they’re smart and they figured out the pr, okay, if somebody is not a great.

[00:49:57] You can come in and you can do some things with them and maybe on that day they get 10 more pounds. And then maybe by training the right way, they’ll end up putting on, hey maybe 25 in six months or something. We’ve seen that. And that makes sense. Cause you’ve got all these different joints.

[00:50:14] Grippers is kinda weird because you can have somebody go from absolutely cannot close it to close it for reps by getting it in their hand the right way. And then even by training that way, the progress is just remarkably slow. Yep. So it’s if somebody wants to close grippers and they like buying grippers, that’s great.

[00:50:36] Especially if you’re an American, do what your liberty calls you to. But for a lot of people, what would be better? Here’s a couple things that I think would be dramatically better. The first one is for a lot of people, I would say, if we could get you to do more of your pullups and chin-ups using either a rope or a thick towel, that would be better by, by a large margin.

[00:51:02] Especially because that gives you so many more freedoms for the variation of your reps. And now it will be, you’ll definitely have a hand element in the equation. So to me, that right off the bat, substantially better if we could get someone to use a bar where their hand is more open, substantially better.

[00:51:24] There’s a lot of fat bars on the market. Mike, when I first got started in Grip, it was like 1998 or 99, and I remember I read this book and the book is telling me I need to get a a thick bar. . And I start going around to sporting good stores in the Detroit metro area, . And everybody looked at me like I was an idiot.

[00:51:48] No son. This is a barbell. We don’t make barbells bigger than this. And my first thick bar was something I actually built in our high school shop class. Oh, nice. No, man, it was super rudimentary. Basically they had a piece of a 1.9 diameter stock laying in a corner.

[00:52:06] And I got the teacher to agree that was gonna go in the trash pile. And then we just did a set of washers that we welded on the inside to, to stop the plates moving. And that was kinda it. Yeah. And I will remember the day forever, the day that I first did my lifts throw on. 2 25 struggle mightily to get in some deadlifts with it.

[00:52:29] And I probably did eight or nine sets that day of twos and threes. Didn’t think too much of it. Did the rest of my session. Woke up the next morning and felt crippled. , I remember I had never had a soreness like that in my arms. Now I’ve had, I’d had soreness before cuz we’re fricking teenagers and we’d go to the gym and curl for an hour and bench press.

[00:52:52] Yeah. And I can remember times that my hands would feel really tired from wrestling, but I’d never felt soreness like that. And. I think that was one of the things that just really got my attention to man, there’s something to this. But you go back to then there was no options. If you go right now and you open up your web browser and you start looking with keywords like axle fat bar, two inch bar, you will find no less than 20 different distributors and vendors that will sell you a barbell made like that.

[00:53:26] They have, I don’t know, Mike I’m gonna have to bet that there’s probably 30 or more varieties of some kind of slip on grip. Oh yeah. There’s a ton now. Fat grips. When we say fat grips, it’s if I say Kleenex, right? Yeah. Kleenex is a brand of tissue. The real thing is the product is a tissue.

[00:53:43] Kleenex is a Fat Grips is a brand of a slip bond grip, but they are probably the household name. And ultimately I don’t even think it matters like, You know what, go get you a couple of them and guys, figure out how comfortable it is in your hand. It should be wide enough that your fingers are expanded and not that close to your palm.

[00:54:08] But it also should not be so big that you feel like all you are really doing is just pinching with your thumb. So shop around. A lot of these grips are, man, I was at the academy here in my city the other day. They have a brand of slip on grips right on the shelf at the Sporting Good Store for eight bucks.

[00:54:28] Oh, nice. And you know what? I bet they’re indestructible. Yeah, they’re all pretty similar. Yeah. Like you, once you buy that product, it doesn’t go bad. No. And as long as you don’t put some kind of solvent on it, it’s never gonna break down or rip or anything like that. For most people the access to getting.

[00:54:47] So much benefit might only be 10 bucks away and throw it in your gym bag and man, just make it a practice that between either your chin-ups and pullups, or your rowing, or your curling or you’re deadlifting or when you’re carrying stuff, you use those things every week and don’t worry about how much you’re using, just try to keep making that number go up.

[00:55:12] So it’s not a question of if it’s a good lift or a bad lift. The real thing is, man, are you getting better at it? And if you are, keep doing that’s gonna be useful to you.

[00:55:22] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, no, I agree. That’s awesome. Wanted to let everybody know that we’re super excited because we have a grip product coming out.

[00:55:31] Then you’ll be teaching everyone. It’s not necessarily for people who are elite grip level competitors, though I’m sure they’d learn a lot of stuff from you. It’s more for people who are looking just to get. Overall stronger for who knows, like everything from, jujitsu to just, training in the gym grip is associated with longevity.

[00:55:53] And like you said, it, if you know the things to do and what to avoid, it doesn’t really add that much to your overall program. But I think there’s a lot of, like we talked about with the grippers, there’s just a lot of horrible advice of where to start. And unfortunately, I’ve seen people go down the wrong direction and then they know, rightfully get of frustrated with it and they can’t figure it out.

[00:56:17] Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about the, what you’ll be teaching and the product that’s coming

[00:56:21] Adam Glass: out. I’m really excited about this and there’s a special community of people that I really want to get access to for this. Okay. And it is the people who are just not going to be able to chase.

[00:56:37] Maybe the thing they started with when they got into fitness and lifting and all these various things. So there’s a person out there and man, they just love to see the number in their notebook increase month by month, but maybe they were in a car accident, maybe they’ve had a surgery, maybe something has happened and they just know that their day of another 50 pounds under squat this year just is not gonna, it’s not gonna play out that way.

[00:57:08] Shifting the focus into the hands and arms can be really fun because it’s another area to progress and you’re getting stronger, but it’s also safer access. Yes. Especially the way that I show people to do it. So the groups of people that I really want to help as we get into this year is the people who want something they can keep getting better at.

[00:57:32] Because their first love is just not as accessible. And then that second group is the people who have that thing they love. Maybe they love baseball, they love volleyball, they love to golf. They love to kite board, right? Yeah. And realize that, man, if my hand or my wrist or my thumb wasn’t having this issue at this point in the activity, I would be doing better.

[00:57:58] So the real focus I’d like to see is to present, how do you take this really big idea? I know probably guys if you’re looking at grip and you’re never seen it, it seems like it’d be just so simple. But the thing is, the hand can articulate in so many ways and there’s so many available ranges of motion.

[00:58:14] There’s a lot of interesting things you can do. I wanna open up access for that. To show people how they can make a lot of progress this year in something that, man, I think they’ll really come to enjoy when they find their favorite thing. Generally speaking, it seems if you take any given person, Mike, and you show them maybe six or seven of the kind of things that people do when they’re training their hands and their wrists and their fingers, there’s gonna be something that they’re unusually well at, like starting off.

[00:58:47] I’ve had people come over the house and maybe they really struggled with the fat bar lifts, but you ask them to go grab two plates and sandwich ’em together and pick ’em up in one hand and they just do it effortless. And usually it’s funny they have a life story attached to that.

[00:59:03] Oh yeah, when I was in high school, I apprenticed of a brick layer and for four summers I was a mason. And it’s dude, you got a pretty strong hand. I think for some sports people will not realize how much a stronger hand will help them until they have consider this thought listeners in the nfl.

[00:59:24] The outcome of entire seasons has been decided when a defender was unable to maintain a grip on a guy’s jersey. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like in the entire NFL season can swing. The moment one guy was just not able to keep that grip in the whole scale of the game change. And that guy ran in the touchdown and then their team got revved up and then they made a conversion and all of a sudden, the whole spirit of the thing shifts and you go back and it’s like, why did we lose?

[00:59:58] If you wanna get really specific, we were ahead until that one guy got right ahead of that defender and the guy had a grip on the back of his shirt and he lost it. It’s quite a thing to look at. I’ve had friends tell me that they’ve been out on a golf course and they realize by about the eighth or nine fold that, their swing isn’t feeling bad and their body’s feeling pretty good, but their wrist is getting tired too fast.

[01:00:23] And you can see it when you look at their, when you look at their numbers, Wow, the first 25 of your guys round, you were having great drives, Your short game looked clean. And then you start getting sloppy right about here. What’s breaking down? It’s not their focus, it’s that their risk is too fatigued.

[01:00:39] Hey, we can do something if that. And, another group of people, Michael, go highlight. You got to meet this person. If you remember Marlene Bing. Yeah. From movement. Yeah. Here’s a key thing. In America, as people get older, they’re typically needing things like they might need this prescription medicine, and they might need it like every morning at 8:00 AM or something.

[01:01:00] When you are getting older and you’re having wrist and hand pain and weakness, you can reach a point where you might not be able to twist, open that bottle to get that pill you need. I remember one of the days Marlene came in and sat down. I said, Marlene, what do you wanna work on? She goes, I can’t open envelopes.

[01:01:20] So what do you mean? She said, My, my mail is coming in and my thumb is not working well enough right now to open up these envelopes. and I just never considered that wow man. What happens when a person is had something degraded to the point that even things that a lot of us would call a simple task becomes impossible.

[01:01:41] And it was very frustrating for her. So we got to work on her and within six weeks she was able to open any envelope she wanted. And it was funny cuz she was happier with that than the same guys I was working with. And we put 20 pounds on one of their pinch lifts. Yeah. So that to me is something that I’d really like to accomplish with the work we’re gonna do is, man, I wanna take away the fog and the confusion and I just wanna make it very clear that here is a path, this is an arena that you can come in and you can win.

[01:02:15] Is it gonna be a problem that you’ve got small hands? No, because the hands you have or the hands you have. Yeah. Is there gonna be a problem that you’ve had wrist pain? No. I’m really hoping that I can reveal some things that make that go away. Mike, another key area that we’re gonna touch on in the course is going to be approaches that strength athletes have used successfully to resolve and elbow tendonitis.

[01:02:40] Generally speaking, the way that I have made progress with myself and friends of mine that were hurting, it just looks different than what I see some of the physical therapists recommend. So for some people, if you have chased what your therapist has already recommended and it seem to work, maybe I can show you a couple things that they’re just not thinking of to include that might have a really big impact.

[01:03:05] And I think that’d be a great thing to help anybody get outta pain.

[01:03:09] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, and that’s a super common one. I I just did a call before this with a guy when we were talking all about that. And if you just ask lifters in general, like how often have you had, tendonosis, tendonitis, elbow pain, golfers, elbow, whatever, tennis elbow, whatever you wanna call it, I would bet that it’s a very large percentage of people who have that or currently have it.

[01:03:32] Adam Glass: Man, I would, I don’t have the numbers to prove anything here, guys, so this is just a thought. But I will tell you this observationally, I know three times more guys that are not seriously chasing their fitness pursuit at this point because of elbow related pain rather than back. Most lifters who are suffering from a back pain will pretty quickly figure out their own workarounds.

[01:03:59] They’re gonna figure out what to do and not do. When you have a really horrific flare up of elbow pain, the thing about it is it takes you out of the equation for almost everything you’d wanna do. Even things like if you have a bad flare up, you might say Okay, look, you know what, I’m just gonna leg press today.

[01:04:15] And what do you learn loading the damn 40 fives on the leg? Press hurts so bad you don’t even wanna do it. Yeah. I think about out of my house, I’m moving a lot of feed every week, guys. I got 50 pound bags of feed and 150 pound bales of hay. I’ve had buddies show up. lot of days we’ll get done arm wrestling and I’ll say, Hey, you guys wanna help me go check out the goats.

[01:04:34] And they always wanna see ’em. They’re guys that they can easily lift the house. But picking up a 50 pound sack of food is so painful, they’d rather not do it. And it’s Oh man, we can help you with that. There’s things that can be done that will give you an amount of relief. And the thing is everyone has ever suffered this nose when you’re hurting, even the promise of 1% less pain is appealing.

[01:05:01] Oh yeah. . So if you’re not suffering from that, awesome. And I wanna show you some things so that maybe you never get into it, but if you are suffering I obviously could never promise anything too solid, make it all go away. But I’m pretty sure there’s gonna be some things we’re gonna cover that will offer you some relief with some of the things may give you some relief immediately.

[01:05:24] And I think that’ll be, especially Mike, with your background with tissue work, there’s a lot of things, that I don’t even do yet. I would really love to see included with it. Because there’s just, the great news is if someone is suffering right now, there are a lot more levers they can pull than they might know.

[01:05:43] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, No, I agree. And I’ve used, a lot of the tips I learned from you over many years now, helping just tons of clients with that because it’s just, it’s so common and then it’s almost one of those things that’s so easy to take for granted. And once you, and I’ve had, tendonitis in both elbows multiple times before, and I was also an idiot and did give myself tendonosis in my knees and my elbows on purpose a couple times to see if I could resolve it.

[01:06:11] I

[01:06:11] Adam Glass: like that. I like

[01:06:12] Dr Mike T Nelson: that. I don’t recommend that to anyone, but I’m like shit, if I’m so good at. How about I just give it to myself and see if I can

[01:06:20] Adam Glass: fix myself?

[01:06:20] [01:06:23] Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Super special. Thanks to Adam Glass for coming on here and talking all about training principles and especially grip strength. If you are interested in learning more about the product that I have coming out. With Adam Glass. Look for the link.

[01:06:48] Below. It depends on when you’re listening to this podcast, but if you’re on my email list already, Through Mike T nelson.com. You will get all of the information there. Adam has a link also, you can find out more information. From him. And his link is a better grip, strength.com. And go to the links below here. We’ll have all the information.

[01:07:14] Super excited for this product. I think it’s going to be very unique. And like I said, in the interview, There’s very few people who have been able to do some of the grips stuff that Adam has been able to do. And there’s very few people who can actually teach it at the same time. Also check out that product in the link below.

[01:07:35] And then stay tuned to next As I will have part two of the interview with Adam Glass and we talk a little bit more about fat loss, body composition, and some aspects of a metabolic flexibility. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast, a greatly appreciated. I will talk to you all next