Striving for Goals - part 1 & Pinch Gripping

Well I hope you're all beginning to grow in the new year. Grow bigger, grow stronger, grow smarter, grow in family, grow in faith, even grow in wealth. Let yourself be motivated by the optimism of the newness of the year and then focus that into getting better at something. You're either moving toward a goal or moving away from it. But the key phrase is movement. Let's talk a little more about goals.

In the last newsletter I told you that it was a great time to start setting yearly goals or to pick new goals for yourself or to assess where you are in accomplishing your goals. I hope you've all had a chance to do that. That's important to do periodically. Now let's talk a little bit more about shaping your goals.

1. Quantify your goals. Last week I told you to get specific about what you want. That goals with a very general nature often fall by the wayside. For example: Don't just decide, "I want to become bigger." Decide, "I want to gain 20lbs and an inch on my arms." The difference in these two goals is that one is very general and hard to assess. While the other gave you specific levels to achieve which are easy to measure. This should apply to whatever type of goal you're setting be it strength, fitness, family, money, whatever.

2. Prioritize your goals. This is especially important for those of you who wish to balance your life or who had a lot of spread out goals. If you want to achieve multiple different tasks in multiple different areas you cannot allow your focus to begin spread so thin that you become ineffective. Many times goals will do this for themselves, or you will find that you become so pointedly active in one particular achievement that you realize that it was the thing you most pointedly wanted to achieve in the first place. Remember that balance in life leads to the greatest happiness so when you prioritize what you want don't sell yourself short by picking only a physical goal. Become a whole person with intellectual, spiritual and physical attributes.

3. Plan. A goal without a plan is just a dream. Dreams are great but if you want to actually achieve them you've got to put the machinery in place for it to happen. Rarely does someone stumble on the achievement of a dream with no effort. And never physically. You don't squat 800 pounds the day after you simply wandered into the right gym. You don't do it without desire and the planning to back up that desire. Once you've established what you want specifically what you want the most and it what order you'd like to achieve them you can set down the steps to get there. It's important to do the first two steps first because they will dictate how you plan. When you need to do what, how much time and effort you need to spend on each thing and what other resources you need to learn from or get involved.

4. Be realistic. What does this mean? This means that in the day to day planning to achieve your specific quantified and prioritized goals you need to think intelligently about the steps necessary to get to them. This means how much time can I reasonably spend achieving these things? Do I have the foundational tools of learning or physical skills to start achieving these things or do I need to work on them first? If you can squat 225 today more than likely you can build the ability to squat 500 pounds, but not next week. Not without really understanding the form and your body and how to set up a training program and spending time and effort to get there.

5. Be daring. I like talking about goals and how to achieve them. But I don't want you to get caught up in the minutia of the baby steps necessary to get there to the point that you lose your excitement for achieving something great. You've heard nothing ventured nothing gained, well if you don't dare to believe that you can be great at something then you never will. The overall belief in yourself to dare greatly and the excitement that you might be the best at something will keep a fire lit under you to make progress towards your goals. And it effects every other area of your life. If you're constantly striving to be the best athlete you can be, and are intelligent about it, it can carry over to being the best man, the best father, the best friend, best businessman, or whatever you want to excel in.

6. Learn to enjoy the process. Goals are the key to getting things done. It can also be the key to driving you insane. Especially if you're an alpha personality type of a guy. Or if you built the drive to achieve things no matter what. Another part of the balancing of life is to learn to want your goals, but to be happy where you're out. I don't mean the sappy acceptance of a bad situation type of being-happy-where-you're-at. I mean that many people who have left bad situations and were super motivated and achieved whatever level of success we see of them, also found that just because they changed their situation, they didn't get any more happiness. Spiritual fulfillment first, then focus on goals is the key. If I didn't know Jesus Christ and had come to a place of internal acceptance, regardless of what else I achieved, I'd just be a guy with high achievements who was still unhappy.

Life is too short to not seek happiness. Life is too short to not seek greatness. You can have both. Dan John has said some excellent things regarding the fact that as your physical goals increase so must your spiritual and mental and recovery times. That means you can't spend all your time with the iron and no time resting, praying, or being a real person. If you can achieve your best lift or make the most money or whatever your goal, by shutting everything else out and selling your whole life to that or if you can have a balanced life and happiness and still make the same goal, why wouldn't you do that? Balance is actually the key to greater success. More on seeking balance and goal achievement next time.


TRAINING TIP

Pinch gripping. When you train your hands there are literally hundreds of ways you can train them. Such is the gift of the incredible design by God of the human hand. It's important I think to train it from multiple directions. Within hand training you can basically break things down to supporting grip, crushing grip, pinching grip, bending/wrist strength, and finger extension/hand care. Today we're going to talk about pinch gripping. Unless you're in the hard core hand strength-training world you probably don't think much about pinch gripping. But it's one of the most important types of grip training you can do.

Why?

Because it really involves the thumb to the greatest degree of all other hand strengthening. And the thumb is involved in every other type of grip as well as preventing imbalance in the musculature of the hand. The simplest way to train pinching is plate pinching. You simply turn two barbell plates smooth side out, place your thumb on one side, your palm down over and your fingers on the other and lift them. You can do this one or two handed. You can do this for heavy singles, or repetition lifts or for time. I suggest you do some of everything and if you have specific strength goals in mind, then you modify your routine to be closest to those goals. For instance Dennis Rogers, who is the greatest card tearer in the world, in the early part of his training did a lot of pinch gripping with a smooth thin plate.

Why?

Because it trained his hand in the right position to tear cards. To have the strength to squeeze a deck of cards tightly enough to do the kind of things he does with them. He also trained it heavy but with multiple finger combinations and for duration to build the type of strength right for a ripping feat like card tearing. I'm not going to give away anymore because he has some cool stuff about to come out in his arm and hand strength course and his tearing courses. Much more specific and advanced than I'm giving here.

I like to train pinch with varying combinations so as to give my hands the greatest overall strength. One of the most productive things I've done is to alternate between one and two handed pinching every other workout. There seems to be a good carryover between them. This was a tip I got from Brett Jones who has a monster grip and allowed me to pinch grip two 45s. You can also do multiple exercises with a pinch grip other than just the basic deadlift and you can make your own implements. Kim Wood had a two by four with hooks mounted to it that he would hook on a barbell and lift with a pinch grip. You can do pinch grip, swings, cleans, upright rows, round the body passes, even tosses, all of which makes for lots of fun and variety in training. Try mixing it set for set with a heavy lift during your recovery time.

There seems to be four or so high level goals to achieve within pinch gripping recognized within the hardcore hand strength community. There are obviously countless other ways to do this. I just list these to give you something to shoot for. Pinch gripping 5-10lb plates (or six if you have giant hands like Wade Gillingham), 3 - 25lb plates, or 2 - 45lb plates or the Blob. The Blob is the cutoff end of a York 100lb cast dumbbell. It only weighs 50lbs, but it is smooth, wide and slopes outward making it extremely difficult to grip. So far I've done the 5 - 10's, 3 - 25's and 2 - 45's. I'm working on the Blob. You really have to train that specifically with block weights (the cutoff ends of cast dumbbell, round or hex). If you're not training your pinch grip, get on it. Because the stronger you get at that, the stronger your base hand strength will become and you'll be able to display greater feats of hand strength through practice. If you're into strongman feats, pinching is a must for tearing phone books and cards. It doesn't require a tremendous amount of energy to train but it's very rewarding for what you put into it.

Now get out there and pinch your wife..... OOPS sorry. that's not training.

You'd better NOT do that and then tell her that I said it was pinch grip training. If I start getting angry letters. there will be consequences. LOL


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