How to Improve Grip Strength for Jiu-Jitsu: The Complete Guide for Grapplers

In Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, grip strength can make the difference between controlling your opponent and losing the position.

Whether you're fighting for wrist control, maintaining your guard, or locking in a collar choke, your hands and forearms are constantly working. If you do not have the grip strength and grip endurance, your forearms fatigue, and suddenly your grips break, resulting in your opponent escaping.

The good news is that grip strength can be trained just like any other muscle group. 

With the right exercises and a small amount of dedicated training, you can develop significantly stronger hands and forearms.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

• Why grip strength matters in Jiu-Jitsu
• The three main types of grip strength
• Best grip strength exercises for Jiu-Jitsu
• Bonus: One old-school forgotten exercise you can do at home
• A simple grip training routine you can follow
• Common grip training mistakes

Why Grip Strength Matters in Jiu-Jitsu

Jiu-Jitsu relies heavily on gripping and controlling your opponent’s gi or limbs.

A strong grip will enable you to establish and maintain collar and sleeve grips, control your opponent's limbs, and finish submissions like collar chokes. This allows you to control your opponent for longer periods and finish submissions more effectively.

Developing your grip strength can also play an important role in injury prevention for Jiu-Jitsu athletes. The hands, fingers, and forearms are placed under constant strain during gripping exchanges. When these muscles fatigue quickly, smaller joints and tendons are forced to absorb more stress, increasing the risk of strains or overuse injuries. Incorporating regular grip training, forearm strength training, and finger strength exercises helps strengthen the muscles and connective tissue that support these joints, allowing grapplers to maintain strong grips while reducing unnecessary strain.

For grapplers, improving grip strength is one of the fastest ways to gain a competitive advantage on the mats and increase longevity in your hands, wrists, and elbows.

The Three Main Types of Grip Strength

Grip strength is not just one thing. There are three different types of grip strength important for Jiu-Jitsu.

Crush Grip

Crush grip is the ability to close your hand with force. This type of grip is used when fighting for wrist control and establishing strong grips.

Hand grippers are one of the most effective tools for developing crushing grip strength.

Support Grip

Support grip is your capacity to hold onto something for an extended period of time. This is crucial in Jiu-Jitsu for developing the grip endurance required to maintain control during long exchanges.

Exercises that require you to maintain your grip will build this type of grip strength (using fat grips, towels, or grip implements are perfect for this).

Pinch Grip

Pinch grip involves holding objects between your fingers and thumb. While not as much used in Jiu-Jitsu, it supports grip strength and is practical in everyday life. Think picking up heavy books or awkward objects.

Key Strength Areas Grapplers Often Overlook

While crush, support, and pinch grips describe different ways the hand applies force, effective grappling grips also rely heavily on finger and wrist strength. In Jiu-Jitsu, your fingers are responsible for maintaining sleeve, collar, and pant grips, while the wrists and forearms stabilize these grips during pulling, twisting, and fighting for control. Without strong fingers and resilient wrists, even a powerful grip can quickly fatigue or be broken by an opponent. For this reason, grapplers should include exercises that target the fingers and wrist directly alongside traditional grip training to build well-rounded grip strength and forearm development.

Best Grip Strength Exercises for Jiu-Jitsu

Here are some of the most effective grip strength exercises for grapplers.

Hand Gripper Training

Using a hand gripper is one of the simplest ways to build crushing grip strength. Heavy grippers act as a powerful grip strengthener, allowing progressive overload similar to lifting weights. They are also easy to use at home, at work, or between training sessions.

Towel/Rope/Gi Pull-Ups

By throwing a towel, rope, or your gi over a pull-up bar, you’ve just created one of the best grip training exercises that develops both crush grip and support grip in a vertical position - very specific for Jiu Jitsu. 

Dead Hangs

Dead hangs build support grip strength and help develop grip endurance, which is essential for maintaining grips during long rounds of Jiu-Jitsu.

Hang from a pull-up bar for as long as possible. If that’s too easy, then try wrapping a towel around or using a fat grip to increase the surface area of the bar. Alternatively, hang from one hand.

Farmer’s Carry

Another great option to build support grip strength. The Farmer’s Carry is a versatile exercise that not only strengthens your grip but also your upper back and core, while improving balance and cardiovascular endurance. 

Pick up the heaviest pair of dumbbells you can manage and simply walk while maintaining a strong grip.

Plate Pinches

Plate pinches are excellent for developing pinch grip strength. 

Hold two weight plates together between your fingers and thumb, and hold for time.

Extensor Band Training

Many grapplers train their grip but forget about the extensor muscles. Using finger extensor bands improves finger strength and balances grip training, which helps prevent common hand overuse injuries and elbow pain.

Wrist Curls and Extensions 

Wrist curls and wrist extensions are effective exercises for building the forearms and wrist strength, which help support stronger and more stable grips in Jiu-Jitsu. These movements can be performed with dumbbells, kettlebells, and resistance bands to target wrist flexion, extension, pronation, supination, and deviation, each targeting different areas of the forearms.

Bonus: One Forgotten Old-School Grip Exercise to Build Powerful Forearms At Home

While exercises like hand grippers, hangs, and other grip tools are excellent for building grip strength, there is one old-school method that many athletes overlook: 

Rice Bucket Training

Rice bucket training is an old-school exercise used to develop finger, hand, and wrist strength. By placing your hands in a bucket of rice and performing movements like opening, closing, twisting, and digging, you create resistance in multiple directions. This simple exercise is great for building grip endurance, finger strength, and injury resilience, and it can be performed using a variety of different hand and wrist movements.

How to do it

1. Fill a bucket with uncooked rice
2. Submerge your hands
3. Open, close, twist, and dig your hands through the rice for 2–3 minutes

Simple Grip Training Routine for Grapplers

Here is a simple grip training routine you can add to your weekly training.

Train grip 2–3 times per week by selecting one of the following combinations. You can perform these exercises at the end of your training session or at a separate time. 

Combo 1

Hand Gripper - 3 x 8-12/failure
Finger Extensor Bands 3 - 15-25 or Rice Bucket - 3 x 20-30s

Combo 2

Dead Hang - 3 x 20-30s/failure or Heavy Farmers Carry - 3 x 20m/failure

Wrist Extensions - 2 x 15-20
Wrist Curls - 2 x 15-20

Combo 3

Towel/Rope/Gi Pull-Ups - 3 x 6-10/failure
Plate pinch holds - 3 x 15-30s

This routine takes less than 15 minutes and can dramatically improve your grip strength over time.

Common Grip Training Mistakes Grapplers Make

Many athletes struggle to improve grip strength because they make a few key mistakes.

Only Training One Type of Grip

Grip strength includes crush grip, support grip, and pinch grip. Ignoring any of these can limit your progress.

Using Cheap Adjustable Grippers

Many cheap grippers provide inconsistent resistance and break easily. Serious grip training requires heavy-duty hand grippers that allow progressive overload.

Not Warming Up

Before you start gripping, make sure to warm up with wrist movements and lighter exercises to keep your hands healthy. You can also use finger extensor bands and stress balls/grip rings, which are perfect for warming up.

Ignoring Wrist Strength

Grip strength is closely linked to wrist strength. Strong and stable wrists improve endurance and grip durability during dynamic matches.

Overtraining

Another common mistake is training grip strength too often without proper recovery. Since the hands, fingers, and forearms are already heavily used during Jiu-Jitsu training, excessive grip work can lead to fatigue and overuse injuries. For most grapplers, grip training two to three times per week is enough to build strength while allowing adequate recovery.

Final Thoughts

Grip strength is one of the most important physical attributes for Jiu-Jitsu athletes.

A stronger grip allows you to:

• Control opponents more effectively
  
• Maintain grips longer
  
• Improve submission finishes
  
• Reduce the risk of common hand injuries

Although your grip will improve over time as you train Jiu-Jitsu, by incorporating dedicated grip training and grip strength exercises, you can develop a much stronger grip in a shorter period of time.

As Jiu-Jitsu continues to grow in South Africa, and the competition gets tougher, this is one aspect you could work on to gain an edge over your opponents. Even just 10–15 minutes of grip training a few times per week can lead to noticeable improvements in your grappling performance.