The thumb is such an integral part of grip training and it is often the weak link. Anyone who has done any pinch grip work knows that the first thing to give out is almost always the thumb. There are already plenty of ways to work on thumb strength, but here are some ideas that I've been toying around with that I thought I'd share. All of them involve the kettlebell, showing again just how versatile they can be as a tool for exercise.

The first is the two kettlebell pinch grip. Same thing as a plate pinch but a bit more akward because of the way the handles slide and the bells try to pull away from one another. When gripping the bells, you must come down from the top. If you let your fingers get underneath, the training effect will be greatly reduced and the exercise will become more about the fingers and less about the thumb.



Second is the bottoms up hold. Pretty self explanatory. The problem you run into here is if you are extremely strong, the bell will be too light and increasing the weight will mean using a bell that is too big to even be grasped. That is where the next exercise comes in.




Here we have the bottoms up hold with weight added. This is actually a variation of an exercise found in John Brookfield's book "Mastery of Hand Strength". In the book, a baseball or softball was used; a hole drilled through the ball was attached to weight underneath. Here we've made it just a bit simpler by navigating around the drilling process.





The last exercise is a variation hold in which the handle can be placed to the outside (finger stress) or the inside (thumb stress). The extra weight of the handle pulls the weight in a different path and targets the selected area (thumbs or fingers) by forcing it to do more work to keep the bell from peeling out to one side.

Give these a shot if you're interested and let me know what you think!