Everyone knows the feeling: you’re just setting a PR on your deadlift or back exercise, and your hand slips off the bar because you’ve lost your grip. At Thor Athletics, you have the best Lifting Straps on the market. In this article, we clearly explain why and when you should use lifting straps and the pros and cons. You’ll get practical tips for technique (deadlifts, rows, RDLs), when not to use them to keep training your grip. This way you can decide if buying lifting straps really advances your training, with more control, safety, and heavier sets.
What should you look for when buying Lifting Straps?
- How do you use Lifting Straps?
- Should you use Lifting Straps?
- When should you use Lifting Straps?
- Extra tip for people who use microplates
Do you usually lose your grip first during an exercise before your muscles fail? If yes, the solution:
How do you use Lifting Straps?
You wear a strap on each hand, put the loop around your wrist, and wrap the loose end around a dumbbell, barbell, etc. This creates a connection between your hand and the dumbbell/bar that is stronger than the strength of your fingers. This way you can hold and move heavier weights, and it also increases safety so you don’t accidentally drop a heavy 50kg dumbbell on your feet.
One of the most important things with Lifting Straps is to make sure the loop is positioned around your wrist so that the end of the strap extends over your palm toward your thumb, and that you wrap the strap around the bar by going under the bar instead of over it, otherwise the strap will slip off and the whole effect is lost.
Should you use Lifting Straps?
Some people are against using Lifting Straps. They will say it weakens your grip. That may be true but ask yourself if you do pull-ups for your grip strength or to have a big and especially wide back! If you don’t do pull-ups for your grip and your grip fails before your back, then Lifting Straps might be a good idea for you.
When should you use Lifting Straps?
When you do a 'row exercise' like a barbell row or a cable row, your grip will often fail before your back does. This also applies, for example, to a Romanian deadlift where you want your hamstrings to fail before your grip to train your muscles optimally.
Avoid using the Lifting Straps during warm-ups as long as possible to still strengthen your grip. You can use the straps in the last one or two warm-up sets before your first working set to get used to a set with Lifting Straps.
Extra tip for people who use microplates
Sometimes people like to use microplates in their programming to overload the exercises they do in small increments. People attach the microplates to the straps and then wrap them around a barbell or something similar to continue making optimal progress.
The Lifting Straps from Thor Athletics are equipped with padding, which increases comfort around the wrists.
Sometimes straps without padding can hurt your wrists and/or irritate your skin, which is why we chose to include padding.
We hope this brings you some clarity about the Lifting Straps.
If you have any questions, please leave a comment below. You can also always email us or fill out the contact form and I will get back to you as soon as possible.
