Keeping Strong in the Office
Normally, one would think that time spent in the office cubicle, or at the desk at school or at home is hopelessly lost for your conditioning. However, a short browsing through the fitness stores or Web-sites and a little bit of inventiveness and you’ll be well equipped for a number or rock-climbing specific exercises. They can improve various aspects of your grip strength and help upper arm muscles recovery and balancing, and even core strength. And, the exercises as you can see on the illustrations below are pretty cameral and won’t attract too much attention (in case you care :-)
1. It is really important to balance grip crushing strength and extensor muscles.
Expand-Your-Hand Bands™ really help. You can find them on Iron Mind site, as well as 45 incredible grip exercises from John Brookfield.
2. Thera-band rings – available from any fitness store these days. You can do a few sets of chest expansions holding them by different pair of fingers.
3. Regular large binder clips (I added a few soft pads). A great exercise for pinch strength. Squeeze and hold for 3-5 seconds. Advanced version: add another clip on top of that which you are holding.
4. Power Putty offers 5 levels of resistance, can be squeezed, stretched, pinched, and pulled to provide exercises for strengthening the muscles of the fingers, hand, wrist, and forearm. Also, different variations of rubber balls or bean bags, the best from my stand point is from Iron Mind, the IronMind EGG
5. A baseball shell filled with led shot, or sand. Exercises include lifting/lowering wrist placed on the desk edge, wrist rotation, dropping and catching.
6. A very challenging static exercise for palm extensors – try to open palm of the hand inside the paper cup.
7. Each office has lots of old paperwork waiting for a shredder. Tear a sheet of A4 paper folded in half five times. (by the way, six seems to be the maximum when you still can grip it with fingers and it gets really challenging for tearing).
8. Nike Hand Grip Gel. Available from Sport Authority and other sport stores.
Different colors offer a various levels of resistance.
Possible exercises:
squeeze and hold (3 seconds or so)
pinch
“large hold” simulation with open grip
press strongly with forearms against the grips placed on the desk – try to guess which muscle group is targeted – yes! - ABS
9. Finally, what can be a better fun than to conclude the session with some nail bending?
“Standardized” resistance version with sharp ends conveniently clipped again available from Iron Mind.
Keep strong,
Oleg Yakimovich January, 2007