The long road to robotic wrists.
There are no shortcuts here, only good practices and planning ahead.
Most of these are things I've learned from a world class Arm Wrestler. They say arm wrestling is %60 wrist, %40 bicep. Now, your fingers, hand and forearms all directly affect your wrist strength. Note, I'm not really talking about wrist size. Size and strength are two very different things. As seen here with the first match after the intro.
Lot's of people, body builders especially, neglect their tendons in general during exercise. I can't find the article right now, but there was a study on long distance runners vs power lifters. Scientists did cross sections on cadavers and found the tendons in the legs of the runners to be FAR more impressive (and healthy) all around than those found in the power lifters. This should tell us that tendons really respond to repetition and time under stress. Here is a good video explaining just what I mean.
People generally also do exercises that do a lot of quick ripping and tearing that build up more red muscle tissue than tendons. This then covers up their tendons and takes over during strain. People who do low reps and a lot of weight don't really activate their tendons very much, as the weight they use is too much for what little tendon strength they have, causing them to just stop after their larger red muscle fiber is fatigued. This is not good for tendon growth.
It's understood in the arm wrestling world (Eddies and many others at the very least.) that in order to develop good tendon strength, you really need to be doing lots of reps and lots of time under tension. About 80% of time lightweight and 20% going heavy. Tendons, especially in your wrists, where red muscle tissue is sparse to begin with, are where the vast majority of your lasting real strength is going to come from in your wrists. Then there's all of the other connective tissues and cartilage that will be built up and become stronger over quite a long time as well. Remember, Tendons lag behind muscles by approx 2-5 years. So it's just going to take some time. But with good planning, nutrition and making certain things part of your routine, when you get there, you'll be friggin robotic.
So, this is how I train my wrists. Note, some of these are for fingers and forearms as well, these all come together as part of the formula for strong wrists. I try to incorporate as many of these principles as I can into
everything I do. Sorry there aren't vids for everything. Wife got a little impatient and needed to work on other projects that actually make us money lol. I'd like to thank her a lot for helping though.
Bounce and pronation Curls.
Been doing a lot of these lately. Not only are they great for my bicep, but also my wrist and pronation. which is my specialty. They are also great for growing your thumb muscle. Can't get enough of these honestly.
If you look closely you can see that the band is not wrapped around my hand. It's wrapped around my thumb. I put the knot right on top of my thumb muscle (You don't need a knot there, I just do it.). When I pronate in and curl up I slowly tuck my thumb into my fist as far as I can.
I do the same with bounce curls...
These are brutal if done right. Beware first timers. You will definitely feel it afterwards.
I do these very slow and methodical. I can't do nearly as many of these as I can normal but I'll still do them till failure whenever I do them.
Leverage lifts.
You can do these with all sorts of things. I do mine with a heavy portable doorway pullup bar. It's the one I put between my rings whenever I want to do standard pull ups and hangs. I like using the bar because I can extend it and the further I do, the harder it gets.
Pro/supination.
This is a movement I use to simulate top rolling and hooking in. I am far more of a top roller so I do pronation a lot, but I'll do some supination as well whenever I use the kettle bell.
Static holds.
These are crucial. You can do these in every angle of your wrist
and arm
and varying points of pressure from the angle/direction of the weight on the other end
and you can add more points of pressure by adding more bands anchored in different directions. Right now when I add more bands, I just grip it directly in my hand and if it's really heavy I'll tuck it under one of the strands of the wrap. Later on I'll probably get more belts and add them that way. They are great because you can just set up and stand there while you watch something. I do them till failure but I'll at least hit 5 minutes, then I'll forget about keeping track of the time and go till failure. At the very end, I do a very slow negative. I try to hit a minute on the negative. I also have a towel tied onto one of my resistance band handles that I wrap around my hand in much the same way as the belt seen here.
Here is how I wrap my hand. It feels just like being in an arm wrestling strap to me except one side of my wrist is free.
The part of the strap coming across my wrist is so that I know I'm raising my knuckles enough and giving constant pressure. I'll feel the strap tighten against my wrist when I bring the top of my knuckles towards my head enough without moving my arm. This pressure also creates a link in my brain where I can actually give more pressure because I'm struggling against something. Now, you don't want it too tight though, else you'll be cutting off too much circulation.
The goal is to keep your knuckles up as long as possible and to not let your wrist bend away from you. Basically imagine you're trying to poor a drink into your lap. I also have mine set up for pronation as it's trying to peel my wrist to my right as well. You can shift the strap to pull more from the top of your hand by arranging the strap to come more off the top. All up to where you want to feel the burn.
Wrist curls.
For me, I never let my wrist go past straight on the reset. This is for arm wrestling purposes so that I don't have muscle memory letting me give my wrist backwards. You never want to let it get to that point because this is a very weak and dangerous position to be in where you can break your wrist. but I think it might be unhealthy regardless to train there. I'll have to look into it.
Anyway, I come up with all kinds of clever ways to get the job done. For this, I've used an insert for my foam roller and looped it through two doubled up very hefty shopping bags. Inside the bags I've got 20 pounds of weight. My kettle bell and my toning ball.
