The following is a guest article from Jarell Lindsey.
10 warriors, trained expertly and in unison, can overcome hundreds. Adversity in such war is your employer; the more hours you face it, the greater it pays you in strength, willpower, and endurance. In training, your body is at war with weakness, immobility, and comfort; your ten fingers are some of the best warriors you can use to change the tide of your lifelong fitness battle.
To expertly train those ten warriors, however, requires safe fingertip training. Your fingers abound with tendons and ligament, some of the most difficult connective tissue to heal when injured. Don’t walk into your training either; a steady jog will do.
Daily gripper training got my crush grip to a decent level, but my fingertip strength for hand balancing was lacking. Here’s how my steady “jog” progressed: I decided to alternate pushups on my knees using my fingertips, the nail-side of my fingertips (man, that was tougher than I thought), and my wrists for 3D hand strength. Lifting one knee to increase the difficulty with each exercise helped until I could do each in a full pushup position.
I am now in progressions of elevating my feet on a chair for all the above exercises, even getting to fingertip holds in a handstand position. I couple these with an isometric fingertip exercise I do twice weekly with intensity, and my progress has been consistent and quite phenomenal, for my humble standards. I’ve been able to do things I’d only imagined or seen in comics, such as pushups for reps on my thumbs.
I don’t doubt that you’ve already noted the absence of set or rep numbers for the above progressions. That is critical to the point I’m about to make: you make your own sets and reps with this training. The focus of mobility training should be variation, so rather than trying to reach 100 fingertip pushups, elevate your feet to add variation whenever you feel like your finger strength can handle it. Your own strength will develop in an incredible way, with a limited chance of injury and a consistent path to progress. Progression is key; with that plus a focus on variation, your 10 warriors will be (wait for it) in good hands.
“Strength is more than just muscle”
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The improvements in hand strength are really helping my handstand reach greater levels of stability.