IronMind Captains of Crush Gripper 1 and 2 Challenge
I have decided to take a serious stab at closing the Captains of Crush 1 and then 2 grippers. This may not sound like a big challenge, but I am taking it one step at a time. Grip strength has not been a strong point in my long 40 years of weight training, and now seems like a good time to make it so! The IronMind Captains of Crush Grippers are world famous in the grip strength arena.
Brief Background
First, I am 55 years old and have been bodybuilding as a hobby on and off for about 40 years. I am 5’10” and 215 lbs.
I started weight lifting at 15 years old, in order to add muscle because I was pushed around a bit at school and was extremely skinny. I made decent progress over a few years and never looked back. There were a lot of years that I stopped lifting for a while, and then there were years that I went all out for months on end and made really good gains.
In 2020, in between peaks in the COVID-19 pandemic (so tired of hearing those words, I promise that will be the only time), I had both of my knees replaced the first in February and the other in July. As a result, I did very little in the way of weight training. Consequently, I lost quite a bit of fitness, strength and muscle mass.
Fast forward to March 2021. I am back in the weight room and starting to recover the strength and muscle mass I lost last year. However, my grip and forearm strength has never been great, and I want to change that. Having purchased a set of Captains of Crush grippers a while ago, I decided to use these in my quest for superior grip strength!
Also see my article: Build your own Wrist roller
I just wanted to give a little background there, but now it is time to make this happen.
Captains of Crush Challenge Starts Now
I am going to start with the Trainer and see how many reps I can do. The goal is to perform 100 reps per day for 30 days, but will change this goal as needed.
My plan is to do the sets throughout the day, not necessarily all at once. I will likely do most while I am working since I work at home providing technical support on the phone.
Also going to measure my forearm and record any gains in size. I will update this page each day to report my progress and anything I am learning along the way. The progress diary will start today, Day 1 at the end of this post. It is 3/11/21 today.
**Update after 6 Days
This is harder than I thought it would be, but this is good as I am already seeing great progress.
My grip turned out to be worse than I thought so I am really pumped to see it get stronger!
I found out that putting this much effort into a challenge like this results in irritation of the skin on my hands and mostly fingers. It will take a few more days for my skin to toughen up a bit and adapt to the daily effort.
Remember that nothing worth doing is easy!! I will update again in a few days or so. Meanwhile, below i am keeping a diary and nots of each day’s efforts.
Join in the Fun!
Please join me if you want to improve your grip strength as well. You can get any of the grippers here:
Captains of Crush and other Grippers
