When You Should Use Lifting Straps for Heavy, Muscle-Building Exercises

JUST ABOUT EVERY gym best practice has an exception. If you’ve read enough of our fitness advice (or you hang around enough CrossFit boxes or with functional fitness devotees), you might have heard that you should rarely turn to tools like lifting straps for an extra edge while you’re training. Those aids should instead be reserved for competitions (if they’re allowed) or max-out attempts, when you’ll use them to help you lift as much weight as possible and don’t care about building functional strength.

The rationale behind this best practice is that straps might help you in the short term (and boost your ego) by helping you lift more weight than you would without them—but in the long term, you’d be better off not using the assistance so you can build more grip strength. That’s a fine thought, especially if you’re focused on training to be as strong as possible or for a specific goal that relates to your capacity outside the gym. If you’re training to build muscle, though—and you’re trying to home in on a specific muscle group that is not your forearms—you’ll be much better off if you strap up on certain exercises.

Take the example laid out by MH fitness director Ebenezer Samuel, C.S.C.S. in our Body Recomp Building Blocks video. He’s demonstrating the chest-supported row, an exercise which is being used to target some of the biggest pulling muscles in your back, the lats and rhomboids.

The key to this exercise, Samuel notes, is focusing on the mind-muscle connection. In practice, that means controlling the weight through the full range of motion and emphasizing the contraction at the top of each rep. The incline bench is already putting him in a position that is more advantageous for his back muscles compared to other variations of the exercise that use a bent-over stance, where the lower back can be a limiting factor—so adding straps to shore up his grip allows for even more focus on the lats and rhomboids.

“Newsflash: I’m not trying to train my grip strength. I’m trying to build muscle,” Samuel says. “I’m trying to hit the large muscle groups. If I were really trying to train my forearms, I would do forearm exercises.”

This advice isn’t just limited to dumbbell movements like rows. When you train heavy compound barbell movements like the Romanian deadlift with the intent to build up your big posterior muscles like your hamstrings and glutes, your grip might wind up being a limiting factor. You can and should strap up to focus on your larger goal of building muscle, not moving weight or building overall strength.

Want more next-level tips like these so you can crush your body recomposition goals? Check out our entire program at Body Recomp Central, available only for MH MVP Premium members.

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