I have used Fat Gripz for years, which is why I wanted to write my own Fat Gripz review. After using them for just a short amount of time, I am confident you will realize Fat Gripz work like they are said to, and there even more benefits of Fat Gripz than you expected!
Personally, I believe using Fat Gripz is the simplest trick for building grip strength and getting bigger and more dense arms. Along with that, they also can save your elbow and shoulder joints if you have joint pain but still like to do a lot of upper body exercises.
If you don’t have a thick bar available for thick bar training, Fat Gripz are your best option because they can instantly convert barbells, dumbbells, chin-up bars, cable attachment several other exercise machines into “thick bars” for thick bar training.
Made from military grade high density compound, you will not have to worry about these breaking or wearing out like other knock-off versions! Fat Gripz are built to last!
If my Fat Gripz review makes you want to go get your own pair, you can order Fat Gripz from Amazon and have them ready for arm day quick!
Keep reading to find out the answers to your questions about Fat Gripz and thick bar training and why you should buy Fat Gripz!
What Are Fat Gripz and What is Thick Bar Training?
Thick bar training is the concept that using a thicker dumbbell or barbell will force your forearms and hands to work harder to grip the weight, producing several beneficial effects. By expanding the surface area, thick bar training forces more muscles in your arms to work to hold the bar. With this simple action, every single muscle in your upper body (and sometimes lower body), is engaged more, and works harder.
There are certain dumbbells and barbells which are specifically made to be “thicker,” but most gyms do not have these and they are expensive to purchase on your own.
For those who don’t have the equipment to do thick bar training, Fat Gripz make the barbell or dumbbell “thicker,” and they are easily transportable and usable.
Fat Gripz Benefits
Keep reading below to see 11 specific benefits of Fat Gripz and thick bar training:
1.) Increased Muscle Activation
The use of thick-bars or Fat Gripz leads to increased muscle activation; because the thicker handles stimulate more muscles to be recruited with each movement.
Increased circumference of the object being held forces your muscles to work extra, just to perform the same movement. This is a very unique stimulus that only Fat Gripz or thick bar training can accomplish!
This is especially useful for muscle activation in your hands, forearms, and in your upper arms. The increase in your muscles of this part of your body will also lead to increased strength.
As a basketball player, Fat Gripz are excellent for helping me catch rebounds or passes “in traffic.” Along with the direct carry over to my sport, the increase in grip strength due to muscle activation is vital for helping me move bigger weights or more reps in pulling exercises such as the deadlift, pull-up, or any rowing movement.
Increasing muscle activation and muscle usage of your biceps, triceps, and forearms is one of the easiest ways to lose arm fat quickly!
Working more muscles at one time is one of the best ways to lose weight quicker, build muscles faster, and design the body of your dreams!
2.) Well-Rounded Arm Training
Even if you do your best to perform a conventional arm workout from all different angles, and with all different muscles; you still will leave much to be desired in-terms of a total arm workout.
With thick-bar training, you will experience a complete amount of training because the thick bar or Fat Gripz will automatically train your fingers, hands and forearms from all angles.
With the bench press for example, the thick bar will effectively train your forearms in an entirely unique way from chin ups on a thick bar.
Often your current grip strength and other factors will compensate for forearm development, leaving a gap in your overall training. Utilizing Fat Gripz or a thick bar will close this gap, and give you a more well-rounded training session.
3.) Unlock the Full Potential of Your Upper Body Muscles
As a result of the ability of thick bars to train your fingers, forearms, and hands at all angles; your body will no longer hold back strength and muscle gains in your upper arms, chest. and back.
Using these grips can make a significant impact on “unlocking” your muscles for full potential. For example, according to one study on the effects of the use of Fat Gripz on NCAA Division 1 male golfers that was published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research,
“The FG group demonstrated significant increases (p ≤ 0.05) in ball speed, carry, drive distance, and left hand grip strength after 8 weeks of resistance training (RT).”
I promise, you will be incredibly surprised at how much stronger your other muscles will become, once they have been uniquely activated with thick-bar training.
Many times, your upper body muscles will become stagnant in their development solely because your training techniques are always more similar than you think. Fat Gripz or thick-bar training will give them an automatic jump-start!
4.) Replicate and Improve Normal Hand Functioning Mechanics
Fat grips can perfectly replicate the natural function of the human hand, which is necessary for lifting awkward and heavy objects. Surprisingly, lifting weights does not truly stimulate grip strength very well, leaving “real world” strength often much behind.
Training with Fat-Gripz or thick bars will correlate much better to the necessities of lifting and moving objects in everyday life.
This is one of the many reasons why combat fighters use Fat Gripz or thick bar training particularly often. Training your grip muscles with conventional lifting does not prepare your hands for grabbing or holding a moving person nearly well-enough.
5.) Improve Both the Concentric and Eccentric Phase of Weight Lifting
When training with thick bars, your flexors and extensors of the muscles in your hand and forearm are forced into continuous contraction during both the eccentric, and concentric aspect of your movement.
When using a smaller bar, your forearm and muscles of your hand usually have a tendency to relax during eccentric contraction, ultimately losing a huge amount of potential gains in both strength and mass.
Simply activating these muscles to the point where they cannot “sleep” on their own, will bring you a particularly unique stimulus right away!
6.) Improve Concentration and Movement Pattern of All Weightlifting Movements
Considering their nature (which makes them harder to handle), you will have to concentrate much harder to lift a weight.
This alone has the potential to make a person remarkably stronger. By forcing you to control the movement, your overall strength can break through barriers much more quickly!
Personally, I have found this incredibly effective when working with deadlifts. By using my Fat Gripz on a few warm-up sets before heavy deadlifts; not only do I pre-activate my grip strength, I also ingrain a far better overall movement pattern.
Without any doubt, I feel much more comfortable attacking heavier working deadlift sets by learning the proper deadlift movement in a much more controlled fashion.
Another movement that becomes much more fluid from concentrating more is the traditional dumbbell curl.
The dumbbell curl is probably the most used exercise ever, but too many people whip through the movement and never create any useful muscle.
Utilizing the Fat Grips during your dumbbell curls will help you to remain focused, control your pace, and actually get some benefits out of the movement!
7.) Improve Your Joint Health and Reduce the Risk of Injuries While Training
With thick bars, you will generally experience less injuries and imbalances because thick bars move the stress away from your joints, and towards your muscles.
A thick bar spreads the weight of force over a larger area, allowing more muscles and joints to take responsibility for the weight moved.
Normally, I have trouble bench pressing or overhead pressing at this point in my life due to nagging shoulder injuries. A substantial shoulder injury to my left shoulder from playing basketball has limited my ability to do nearly any “pressing” at all.
Fat Gripz have help this exponentially by teaching my body a better pattern of movement, while also forcing my muscles to be utilized more properly!
I will probably never bench press or move the amount of weight with during upper body exercises as I did when I was younger, but I can at least do these movements again!
See Also: DIY Joint Pain Relief
8.) Improve Your Grip and Grappling Strength for Combat
As I touched on above, specifically, for those who are in combat sports or need to be prepared for daily combat (military, police), most combat sport handles have similar features with the Fat Gripz.
If you are competing or training for combat sports, the thick-bar will increase your performance for gripping or grappling.
It is a necessity for combat sport athletes, military personnel, or law enforcement officers to have strong grip strength because they are in literal life or death scenarios often! To match these scenarios, your training needs to be nearly perfect!
Using these gripz will inevitably aid you to be more successful offensively, and defensively, when in hand to hand combat situation.
9.) Fat Gripz are Ready to Use in Seconds!
Fat Gripz are amazing because it only takes you a few seconds to fix your dumbbells, pull-up bars, or barbells with them.
Fat Gripz are excellently made, and they remain intact until you are ready to take them off. The safety and portability of this device is unmatched currently, and the learning curve is negligible.
You can take this with you anywhere to enhance your workout, and they are extremely efficient compared with the “cost” of transporting them around.
This is an especially useful trait if you are traveling a lot. If you are someone who travels often but still would like to keep up your training regimen, Fat Gripz can make even a weak hotel gym more-than-useful.
Just attach your gripz to whichever equipment you have available, and your workout will immediately become more intense and beneficial to you!
10.) Increase Metabolism and Lose Weight Quicker
When your metabolism increases, it is easier to lose weight fast.
You can increase your metabolism in a wide-variety of ways, but doing exercises which are uncommon for your body and difficult to perform is one of the best ways to accomplish this.
Using Fat Gripz or thick bar training is awkward, but safe.
Use them with pull-ups, inverted rows, or deadlifts and you will feel more muscles than ever activate.
I especially love using my own pair of these when performing pull-ups. You can build grip strength faster than you could have ever imagined with these!
The result?
You will burn fat quicker than ever!
11.) The Easiest Tool to Build Your Deadlift
Considering your improved grip as a result of the use of Fat Gripz, you will increase your strength for pulling exercises and will be able to pull off bigger deadlifts! According to one limited research study conducted at the University of Drexel,
“Fat Gripz™ can be combined with a strength training deadlift protocol to significantly increase 5RM deadlift strength performance in female university students”
Who doesn’t love bigger deadlifts, right?
I saved this benefit for last because bigger deadlifts were my initial reason for buying my own pair of Fat Gripz. The results came, quickly!
For nearly all of us, the main limiting factor in our deadlift strength is our ability to grip and pull the bar. If you improve your ability to hold the bar, you will quickly move your deadlift numbers up.
Don’t believe me?
Give it a try yourself!
You will be humbled by only being able to deadlift 135-185 pounds at first, but you will quickly see how this makes it easier to pull heavier weights once you take the grips off!
I prefer to do my warm-up sets of deadlifts with the grips on, and then take them off as I move up in weight. I think the most I ever deadlifted with Fat Gripz on the bar was 5 reps of 225 pounds, and that was also the day I came the closest to pulling 500lbs in my weight lifting career!
Sounds useful, right?
Related Reading: Snatch Grip Deadlift Benefits
Do Fat Gripz Work – Should You Buy a Pair of Fat Gripz?
If you could not tell already, I am a huge believer in the Fat Gripz. Fat Gripz are easily one of my favorite pieces of fitness equipment, and I have seen them work for myself and others who I train with.
If you still have to ask “do Fat Gripz work” at this point, I’m guessing you didn’t even read this article!
There are a lot of reasons to be nervous about purchasing different pieces of fitness equipment, but Fat Grips are as close to a sure-thing as it can get for you. The science behind them is simple and effective, and they are the type of product which you will want to use more, and more.
If you have any extra doubts about the benefits of Fat Gripz, feel free to contact me and ask!
Fat Gripz Alternatives – Other Ways to Do Thick Bar Training
Although you can easily find many different Fat Gripz alternatives on Amazon or through other shopping outlets, the original product has much better material and they are much more reliable. The problem with the alternatives is that since they have only “stolen” the idea is that they are not manufactured with the same type of material, and they will not last as long.
Also, Fat Gripz are affordable enough that you don’t need to try to save money on one of the knock-off alternatives!
In my opinion, you should not look for alternatives to Fat Gripz, and you should purchase the original!
However, if you want a DIY thick bar training alternative, you can simply wrap a small hand towel over the bar and grab onto it. The results won’t be the same, but they are sufficient until you finally purchase a pair of Fat Gripz!
Concluding Thoughts – Fat Gripz Benefits
Probably the most remarkable advantage of Fat Gripz is cost saving, as thick-bars are expensive and not for anyone who doesn’t own their own personal home gym. With the use of Fat Gripz, you are able to enjoy the benefits of thick-bar training at a lesser cost, and without any of the hassle.
Although nearly all exercise equipment has a small risk factor, Fat Gripz are generally quite safe to use.
Honestly, it is very unlikely that you will be able to hurt yourself while using this training tool.
For the small cost of buying one pair of fat-gripz you can easily improve your grip strength, save your shoulders and elbows from unnecessary strain, build a stronger deadlift, and build a more complete and functional body overall!
