Ideas on increasing hand steady ness and strength

I broke my arm a couple of years ago and my hand/arm strength dropped significantly. As I practice at the range this affects me causing shakes or trembles affecting my accuracy after a few magazines of practice, it kind of defeats the benefits of practice. Any one have any exercises and ideas?

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Thanks I missed that fixed it

@Derek

I had a dog bite (only one I have had) take out a structurally important bone in my left hand. To strengthen my grip I put a 10 lb. weight on a rope fixed to a dowel and roll that up and down sort of like a yoyo but I control how fast it goes up and down. That did alot for my hand strength.

YMMV. Hope it helps.

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I use, and passed on to quite a few others: racketball. Cheap and easy to obtain. You can also get the grip training tools (Crushers).

The one from @Zavier_D is also an excellent tool.

Dry fire practice. Heck, just holding the gun up there can be a workout!

One of my dates boys has terrible hand strength, and his arms are not all that good either. I started him on just the racketball and after a few weeks he had quite a bit of improvement. Gamer hands… LOL There is a reason I call him “Sparkle”…

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I have the same problem; however due to old age. I found Amazon offers a lot of hand grip strength trainers, which I use while sitting around watching TV. My favorite toy however is the ACELETE Auto-Start 2.0 Wrist Trainer Ball Forearm Exerciser Wrist Strengthener Workout Toy Spinner Gyro Ball with LED Lights. This little gyro ball really gives your wrists and forearms a workout. I enjoy seeing how fast I can get this thing going and watching the lights. For $16.99 I found it to be very useful. Hope maybe this will help. Good Luck.

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I use a “Zen Strength Adjustable Hand and Finger Exerciser” that sells for about $15 at Walmart. It is a five-button squeeze exerciser. Each of the five is independently adjustable. Since most humans have one thumb and four fingers (me included), I adjusted four of them to the same tension, and the fifth one to about double that. The four are used as a typical squeeze hand exerciser. The fifth one is for my trigger finger. If I work at it, I can hold it tight and use just the one finger without dropping it. Works great!

Having read much of the above, though, the dry fire suggestion seems the best idea yet.

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You’ve gotten a lot of advice on hand grip stuff, but I wonder if you also need to work on shoulder strength, too. Personally, if you want to follow a YT trainer, just search “Athlean x” and “shoulder exercise”.

Although you can find many, many shoulder exercises out there that would work, I found that my biggest increases in grip strength and shoulder strength were not really from the gym. I could shrug a few hundred pounds, but a couple days painting a few rooms in the house made my grip and shoulders stronger than anything I came up with in the gym, and I had freshly painted rooms by the end of it. :smiley:

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Practice the motions you make when shooting from the low ready or your draw with hand weights. Also hold the weight out with both hands like you hold your gun when shooting.

As stated above, dry practice is great too. I also use this: PRO Hand Exerciser by Gripmaster. The Best Handgrip for Hand Strength.

Push ups, curls and some triceps exercise also helped after an accident hurt my shoulder.

Grip and upper body strength helps (imho) with recoil management and longer sessions at the range.

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@Derek, since your weakness is due to an injury I would suggest you look to the talents of an Athletic Trainer as opposed to a Physical Therapist. I (even being in medicine for 30 years) would not have known the difference between the two until my bud from the USN (also a Corpsman) became one. It is their job to get athletes back to pre injury performance levels. They are very good at what they do, they know how to work the muscles, tendons and ligaments that become deficient during a recovery due to compensation. Following an injury people have a tendency to compensate for their injury utilizing other muscles and such which can set you up for debilitating pain and disability over time as the muscles and such used to compensate are not capable of the job they are asked to do over the long term. Through my Bud’s experience the ones at college athletic departments are significantly better versed than those at Physical Therapy practices.

Cheers,

Craig6

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