Tip of the Week: How to hold weight.

This may seem really simple, yet I see so many people making this fatal flaw. Hell, I used to make this mistake and still catch myself from time to time. When you are holing a weight in your hands with you wrist supporting the weight, say for instance a dumbbell press or bench press. Some people will hold the weight in the palm of their hand and let their hand fold backwards. This causes what is commonly known as a power leak. If you think of your forearm as a column on which the weight is rested and moved through space in a vertical direction, one would hope that the weight would be centered over that column. Very often it is not. Sometimes we get lazy with the wrist and forearms and the wrist flexes back putting the center of the load off balance.

You want to hold the weight in a way that the power produced is transferred to the load in the most efficient way possible. This will require some thinking and re-positioning. You will want to hold the weight where your 2nd knuckles are pointed toward the ceiling. IF you are still having trouble with this think of straightening your wrist as if you were punching towards the ceiling. This position will ensure that you are not losing any of the force being produced and more importantly fewer missed reps and grueling sets.

Hope that helps. Leave comments if you have questions.