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Thread: Grip Strength, Gender, and Shooting Performance

  1. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by Clusterfrack View Post
    Great topic. My thinking on this has evolved significantly over the last few years. Most of the instructors I have studied with emphasized the importance of the CRUSH grip with the support hand. Crushing the gun was supposed to reduce muzzle flip and isolate the sights from the trigger press.

    However, I am now convinced that beyond a minimum level, a crush grip is not required. Relaxing my grip from "max crush" to "tight enough" has allowed me significantly improve my shooting, reduce fatigue, and has largely eliminated my chronic elbow and arm pain issues.

    I grip the gun hard enough to keep it from moving inside my hands during recoil, and have developed better trigger control that doesn't move the gun. As well, I have improved my wrist tension, elbow mechanics, and stance. I'm still gripping the gun hard enough that I have to stop and rest during a long dryfire session. Like a very firm handshake.

    Hwansik Kim has an excellent discussion of grip strength and recoil management, but it's behind a paywall.
    The late Ron Avery also covers this - look up pliable hands on youtube, as well as vectors of force.

  2. #12
    The more I shoot, the more I realize what I do not understand about shooting.

    For USPSA, which is different than, for example bullseye, athleticism helps. I suspect athleticism is related to grip strength, meaning the more athletic the more likely one is to be stronger. So is it the grip strength or the overall athleticism this is at work?

    For some years, I have been convinced support hand strength and technique is more important than your strong hand. Lately, at least with a Glock, I believe my strong hand wrist angle and tension is more important for me than my support hand.
    Likes pretty much everything in every caliber.

  3. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by GJM View Post
    The more I shoot, the more I realize what I do not understand about shooting.

    For USPSA, which is different than, for example bullseye, athleticism helps. I suspect athleticism is related to grip strength, meaning the more athletic the more likely one is to be stronger. So is it the grip strength or the overall athleticism this is at work?

    For some years, I have been convinced support hand strength and technique is more important than your strong hand. Lately, at least with a Glock, I believe my strong hand wrist angle and tension is more important for me than my support hand.
    A propos athleticism and grip: I can't recall where I read it, but I do recall a post where one way to diagnose the overall health of an individual is grip strength or lack thereof.

    Also, Frank Proctor does believe Strong hand plays a larger role in grip than support hand.....check out the 3:57 mark.

  4. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by GJM View Post
    The more I shoot, the more I realize what I do not understand about shooting.
    Yep, 100%.

    I am less concerned with building grip strength; I am quite confident most able bodied adults have the required grip strength to adequately mitigate the recoil impulse of most pistols. What I do think they lack, is the ability to maintain grip pressure throughout the entire string of fire.

    That’s pretty important, and it requires some training, focus, tinkering and self analysis. Because everyone grips the gun differently, discussion of amount of grip pressure and crush grip vs push pull...etc, etc... is hard for most to even understand. Students of the pistol tend to benefit better from such discussions, because they have played with their grip, but for most, the discussion is lost on them.

    IMO, grip texture matters almost as much as grip pressure, but that is a discussion for a different thread maybe.
    "Next time somebody says USPSA or IPSC is all hosing, junk punch them." - Les Pepperoni
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  5. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by John Hearne View Post
    My take is that you need at least 100 lbs of crush grip strength to shoot well. My sample size isn't huge but I have a grip strength measuring device and 100 lbs seems to be the magic number. This mirrors the same finding that Karl Rehn reached. I haven't looked at female shooters but I'm pretty sure that Karl said 80 lbs for women.

    If you google for research articles on the topic, using police academy candidates, then you find research that can't find a significant relationship between shooting scores and grip strength. I attribute this to several factors. First, the typical police qualification course is a poor metric of shooting ability. It's kind of like saying if you can run 1.5 miles in 60 minutes then you "pass." If you used that same "passing" standard, you'd find no correlation between fitness and police work. Second, it is important to be able to isolate trigger finger movement from gripping with the rest of the fingers. I suspect that some police recruits were particularly well muscled, giving them high grip strength numbers but they had never developed the necessary separation between trigger finger and the rest of the hand.

    I think that 100 lbs of crush grip strength in males is a minimal pre-requisite for shooting well. Once you reach 100 lbs, subsequent increases don't yield corresponding improvements in shooting.
    Charlie Perez/Big Panda also came to this conclusion. he had conducted a survey of top shooters and had measured their grip strength.... check out this video too. the 6:46 mark onwards is especially revealing.....

    Of interest to note - he was also a student of Ron Avery. All paths seem to lead to Ron Avery....
    Last edited by gomerpyle; 11-17-2019 at 03:18 PM.

  6. #16
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    I once thought that uber strength would be necessary for action pistol sports - how many have heard of Robert V’s or Jerry M’s grip strength?... but then after hearing a podcast with the greatest action pistol shooter in the world (Eric G) where he says he doesn’t really use hand strength but an isometric push pull - you gotta wonder!

    Oh and read Dan John’s strength standards- his expected standards and his game changer standards are quite attainable.
    Last edited by guymontag; 11-17-2019 at 03:18 PM.
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  7. #17
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    When exercising with V shaped devices under spring pressure, I inverted the device and then gripped it with 4 fingers. My trigger finger remained independent and did not engage. This tip came from Bill McMillan, a once famous bullseye shooter.

  8. #18
    Literal hand strength as a contributor or detractor to shooting performance is not a simple question.

    Shooters taught to grip and shoot primarily through the use of their literal hand-strength (e.g. forearm and thumb muscles) will always have a greater delta when performing at-speed between males and females, and the inathletic vs the athletic. Such methodology works well-enough for many, but that doesn't necessarily associate with them being at their best. Many perform incredibly well in-spite of such methodology, and not because of it.

    Shooters taught to grip and shoot in a more whole-bodied manner, in which their shooting grip recruits the pectoral and trapezius muscles, and with an athletic stance seamlessly integrated from ground-contact to pressing trigger-finger; will have a much smaller delta and a greater difficulty in identifying the limiting factors at-hand. Details like accommodative (or, focal) ability, cognitive ability to recognize "good enough (sight picture) to press (the trigger)," and self-awareness of transitional periods really come into play then - and they are much harder to diagnose and address at any scale beyond one-on-one.

    Transitional periods - such as when shooting on the move and the stance splits between movement necessities (hip orientation) and compromising shooting requirements (shoulder orientation), when accelerating out of the static or decelerating from movement, when shifting targets (laterally and longitudinally - if not vertically as well), or when shifting modalities (e.g. carry this, apply that (e.g. TQ), light to dark or dark to light, confined spaces to open spaces) - all can steal time from a shooter's final endsum of a run. But, outside of such shooting sports, time is not always the most prominent metric in play; though, to emphasize, I don't speak down to the shooting sports in the least when I say this, and the shooting world should be grateful for their existence and influence upon the craft.

    Pardon the self-referencing:

    Re: grip; https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....l=1#post824362
    and; https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....l=1#post817193

    Re : stance; https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....l=1#post944399
    Last edited by runcible; 11-17-2019 at 07:33 PM.
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  9. #19
    When I get in the shooting zone and am doing my best, I’m not really thinking about grip (or recoil for that matter). My hands and wrists sort of absorb the recoil and the sights come right back down where they started. In my mind, it’s akin to catching a football with some heat behind it: you don’t reach out with rigid hands, but with soft hands.

  10. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by txdpd View Post
    I think grip is highly overrated, things like closing a No.2 gripper as an arbitrary standard, you're not even using a crush grip in shooting, it's a support grip.
    This is true. Grippers are crush grip, and highly technical, believe it or not. I’d argue that building your open hand grip (like you’d use on a fat bar deadlift) and your pinch grip (like pinching two 35lb Olympic plates together and picking them up) are probably more useful than working on grippers. If you just want an overall strong grip, grippers are not the best approach. Check out gripboard.com or the grip strength subreddit for advice. They won’t tell you to go buy a bunch of grippers if your goal is well-rounded, useful hand strength with carryover to the real world. But grippers are fun.


    Quote Originally Posted by gomerpyle View Post
    A propos athleticism and grip: I can't recall where I read it, but I do recall a post where one way to diagnose the overall health of an individual is grip strength or lack thereof.

    Also, Frank Proctor does believe Strong hand plays a larger role in grip than support hand.....check out the 3:57 mark.
    You may be thinking of multiple studies that showed a correlation between grip strength and life expectancy. Here’s one article. https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile..../idUSKCN1IM1TA

    But grip strength is just a stand in for overall strength. I’m sure if they had measured overhead press the stronger people would have longer lifespan. Just working your grip isn’t going to add years to your life.

    ——-

    We are making some leaps (having a strong grip doesn’t help) just because two presumably relatively weak individuals finished 13th and 14th. If they had stronger grips, isn’t it possible that they would have finished higher?

    Strength can only be an enabler. It’s not a disabler. Clearly you dont need get into the world of grip sport and develop a world class grip, but for untrained individuals bumping up your grip strength is low hanging fruit. You can make strides quickly. Plate curls, fatbar deadlifts, plate pinches and an adjustable Ivanko Super Gripper will go a long way.

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