EUGENIZATION.

Having trouble with exercises that involve grip? Specifically, exercises where your grip gives out first, such as chinups or deadlifting?

Over grip. Use your best GiJoe kung fu death grip on the bar. Squeeze that bar like you’re trying to make the metal ooze out between your fingers.

This will have the added benefit of making the weight you are trying to lift (or the resistance you are trying to overcome) seem lighter.

Why?

That other Evil Russian, Pavel Tsatouline, explains:

According to the neurological Law of Irradiation, a contracting muscle spills its excitation over into its neighbors. Due to an abnormally high number of nerves in your paws, anything that happens with your gripping muscles deeply affects your whole body.

Translated from Russian: By gripping the bar hard, you create a more powerful contraction in the other muscles.

The Law of Irradiation: As hokey as that sounds, it’s a real effect. Here’s another way to think about it:

Your nerves innervate your muscles in much the same way as a phone company has network wires that reach from a central point into your house (and everyone else’s houses). In this vast network of copper wire, electrical signals travel from one end to the other. Being highly conductive, occasionally there’s some spillover between wires.

The Law of Irradiation illustrates this effect in the human body. The greater the impulse, the greater the spillover into other motor units. Consequently, if you want to amplify this effect, send a greater signal to the surrounding areas. In other words, to assist your grip, overgrip.

So grip away, friends; and lift some real heft.