Next Monday is Star Wars Day! While we haven’t yet figured out a way to use the force, today we’re going to look at how we can develop a Vader-like grip without having to resort to bionics!

Now, most of us don’t normally need to hang on to the underside of a cloud city with only one hand, but a good grip is useful in daily life. Apart from helping you make a good first impression by giving you a strong, firm handshake, your grip strength is also an important component of your overall fitness.

A strong grip is the result of strong fingers, hands, wrists and especially forearms; a combination which makes them more resistant to injury.

Your grip also caps the amount of weight you can lift – even if you could support 200kg, you’re not going to lift that much if your hands give way at 50. It also affects your ability to push and pull, which is indispensable in many martial arts.

So, how do you improve it?

If you’re already doing some weight lifting, the good news is you’re already training your grip strength as you lift. In many cases this should be enough; you grip strength is irmproving along with the rest of your lift. It will improve much more slowly if you are using grip straps, since the straps reduce the effort the hands need to make to grip the bar.

You can decide whether to ditch the straps or not depending on what your training focus is. If you’re after overall fitness, you can go without them, although you will not be able to lift the same weight you could with them. If you’re training for weight lifting, try to use them only some of the time, when you really need them.

Using a thicker bar will also improve your grip faster, as your hands need to work more. If you cannot find thicker bars, you can improvise by taping a few layers around the bar (make sure you don’t use slippery material).

Wrist rollers are an easy way to strengthen the grip. They’re generally cheap, and quite easy to build if you prefer to make your own tools.

When using a wrist roller, make sure you keep your arms extended in front of you. The muscles which control your grip extend into the upper arm, so bending your elbows will stop some of them from working properly. Rolling the weight up and down as many times as possible in a minute is a decent workout.

We found it useful to follow this up with one set of 200 finger extensions with the hands prone, and 200 finger extensions with the hands supine, again with straight arms in both cases. Finger extensions may not sound very hardcore, but doing them when your arms are tired by the roller can give you a pleasant burn.

One final exercise which you can do without any equipment at all is the finger push up. Many people seem to think that this kind of push up has no place outside of action movies, and some are actually scared of it, but it’s surprisingly easy to build up as long as you can do regular push ups properly.

You may want to start by using the kneeling push up while you get used to supporting the weight on your fingers, but you’ll build up to a full finger push up in no time. While you can, if you like, go on to do three, two or even one finger push ups, the five-finger variety is the most useful one for grip strength as you will be putting pressure on all fingers.

A few words of warning: hands are delicate. Do not overload yourself, and be careful when working with your fingers. Whatever benefits you may draw out of a higher load or intensity will be wiped out if you injure yourself, so slow it down and work up – and may the force be with you!

Header image from Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope (Lucasfilm, 1977 / Disney)