I have been wanting to put together a blog on the use of grips for quite some time. I have held off because it’s a difficult thing to “type” out. Today in a couple of my classes I addressed the use of them for the toe to bar component. While there is a lot that goes into the use of grips that is personal preference, there are also a few simple points that should be adhered to for everyone. I’ll also throw in some of my personal “tips” and you can take ‘em or leave ‘em, but just things that have worked for me. Being in the midst of the Open and having week one out of the way without any gymnastics, you can bet you’re going to be needing grips more than once in the next four weeks.
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First, just so everyone knows what I am talking about when I say “grips”. I am referring to gymnastics grips for gripping the rig while performing movements there. There are all kinds of different styles out there but they all share a few common traits. First, something around your wrist to keep them in place. A Velcro enclosure fed through a buckle that you can adjust for how tight you like them. Then a piece of material extending over the palm of the hand and fingers. This is usually leather but there are some other options out there as well. Some have finger holes in them, others have loops attached to the end to put your fingers through, while others are just a “flap”.
Next, why use them? A gymnastics grip is designed for two main reasons. They are designed to help you have a better grip on the rig is number one. The “flap” on them, usually leather, is made to have better stick than your hands. Second, they are designed to help save your skin! We are all familiar with the dreaded “tears” from any volume of rug work. A grip will help prolong the life of your skin; and when used properly will all but eliminate those tears. As an added benefit, when used properly, they will also aid in your grip and help prevent fatigue from setting in so quick. More on this later.
I am not going to go too much into “fit” of them, as that varies greatly depending on the style of grip you chose. However, a couple things to watch for. Obviously make sure the strap is long enough to go around your wrist and stay closed. You also want to make sure the flap is covers at least to the third joint on your index finger (if you have the style with holes in them for your fingers, they’re going to need to be longer than that). Any reputable source selling grips will have a full sizing “how to” on their webpage that I strongly suggest you take a read of and do the measurements before ordering.
Ok, so now that you have selected your favourite grips and they’ve shown up and you’re ready to smash your first workout in them - here’s a couple things you should know. They’re going to need some breaking in. Depending on the grips and you as an athlete and how much “torque” you apply to the grips, this might take two or three workouts. Don’t get frustrated with them until then. You may be a little slower because you’re regrouping and chalking up in the first couple workouts in them. It’s ok. I assure you, no one remembers or cares. Just like any new piece of equipment or gear, they’re going to take some time to get used to. On that note, just because you have grips, doesn’t meant you don’t need the chalk bucket. Still put some chalk on your hands “under” the grip. Then, chalk the front side of the grip that is going to be on the rig. You don’t need to go nuts with the chalk (and believe it or not, there shouldn’t be a pile of chalk on the floor beside the bucket when you are done haha).
When you put the grips on, the strap around your wrist should be tight. Not “cut off circulation” tight, but they should stay in place (maybe with some exception depending on the workout but that’s for another time) and not be able to spin around your wrist. Most grips are designed to have the buckle be on the outside of your wrist (again, this will be in the instructions and how-to from any good grip company). That strap that goes around your wrist is designed to be “loaded”. This is where I see a ton of people go wrong. The flap isn’t just there as a piece of material between your hand and the bar. The whole grip is meant to do some of the work for you. When you are hanging on the bar with a properly loaded grip, the strap around your wrist should be tight and pulling. This helps take a little bit of the load of your actual hand and saves some physical strength grip fatigue. In order to make this happen, think “catch high” when you grab the bar. You want to “overwrap” your hands when you jump up. You should be doing your rig work on your first set of calluses on your palm. When you jump up to “set” and load your grip, make contact with the bar at the butt of your hand keeping the flap of the grip tight on the strap. As your hand slides down into that “first callus” position, the strap of the grip should get loaded up and pull on your wrist. Now your grips are doing some of the work for you. Simply jumping up and gripping as you would without a grip on and having that grip just act as piece of material between your palm and the bar isn’t doing yourself a lot of favours. I’ve actually snapped of couple of the plastic buckle grips from “loading” them up like this.
That’s kind of the long and short for using grips. Regardless of the type or style or material, you can and should apply those points. One thing you might want to try out, which in my opinion, helps to properly load and benefit from grips is not putting your fingers through the holes. Again, purely personal preference here but this works for me. When I use grips with fingers holes in them, before I jump up on the rig, I put just my finger tips (basically to my finger nails) into the holes and extend. This stretches the flap of the grip tight and “loads” the wrist strap. As I jump and catch high like I talked about in the last paragraph, I let my fingers come out of the holes. This helps to ensure the grip is set tight and loaded on my wrist. This is a very common practise and something that works well for most people.
A couple other quick tips for grips:
Let them dry! Don’t just jam them into your bag after using them (unless you like that moldy hockey glove smell kind of thing).
Close the velcro strap up when not using them. This helps the world’s lint supply stay free from captivity on it and makes it actually work like it’s supposed to.
Don’t store them folded seven times or crumpled up and rammed in the corner of your bag. Try to keep them as close to how you were them as you can. Hint: I hang mine on a carabiner on the outside of my bag.
Don’t be afraid of chalking them up. We talked about that above but chalk the inside and outside of them “before” you start a workout to save time during.
That should about cover it. If you are unclear on anything I have tried to make sense of here, track me down at the gym anytime and I’d be more than happy to help show you what I’m talking about. I’ll also say, there is a difference in an entry level “get by” grip and an actual good set. Before you invest some money in a good pair, ask your friends at the gym to try theirs. See what you like and what works for you. Again, feel free to track me down and ask for some advice here; I’ve tried a ton of different ones. I also have three or four different ones of my own at the gym you can take a look at.
I started CrossFit a few years ago, after ending my career as a professional track and field athlete. My goal was to get back in shape and to improve my functional fitness. And one thing I learned quickly was that I needed a high-quality set of gymnastic grips to prevent tearing my hands during bar movements like pull-ups, toes-to-bar and even kettlebell swings.
Based on recommendations from fellow athletes at my local CrossFit box, I got a pair of Bear KompleX three-hole leather grips that I later replaced with the company’s Carbon Comp grips.
During that period, my wife had been working out without any grips at all — until she badly ripped her hands and started looking for solutions. Instead of blindly following my advice as to what grips to get, she did her own research and ordered both the Bear KompleX Carbon Comp (which was my recommendation at the time) and the women’s Tactical three-finger grips from Victory Grips.
After trying both grips during workouts involving kipping pull-ups and toes-to-bar, she immediately told me that the Victory Grips offered better grip and contact with the pull-up bar than the Bear KompleX — it wasn’t even close.
Impressed by her findings, I reached out to Victory Grips and asked if they could send me a cross-section of their product line, so I could try them all and see for myself how their grips compared to the ones I had been using for years.
Vic, the owner of the company, was kind enough to send me five pairs of grips, a false grip strap, and wristbands to try out and review. It’s been a few weeks since I received the package and I’ve had a chance to try most of the grips during intense CrossFit workouts to find out how they perform on the bare steel bars in our box.
In a nutshell, I can tell you that Victory Grips performed exceptionally well. And one model of grips in particular just blows the competition out of the water. To learn why that is and which model of grips has become my favorite, continue reading!
About Victory Grips
Victory Grips was founded by Victor (Vic) Pellegrino, who is an enthusiastic CrossFitter and the guy who designed all of the grips from the company’s headquarters near Savannah, Georgia.
What makes Victory Grips different is that all of their products are the result of an ongoing collaboration with athletes of all levels — not just the pros who compete at the CrossFit Games.
Every grip is designed and manufactured in the United States using carefully-selected materials of the highest quality.
Victory Grips Overview
Victory Grips offers gymnastics grips in four different materials and styles. That makes it easy to pick a pair of grips that best matches your personal preferences (i.e., desired level of protection) and the environment you’re in (i.e., the type of pull-up bar you have to use).
The matrix below shows the available material and model combinations.
Gymnastic Grips Materials
Victory Grips offers one natural and three synthetic materials, including:
- Leather: The classic hand grip material that works great on bare steel bars (speal bars) and in combination with chalk.
- Stealth: A synthetic microfiber that’s vegan and washable. It works best on powder-coated bars, especially for low and medium rep counts (the thinner fabric provides less cushion than other materials).
- X2: Another synthetic microfiber that offers excellent protection, especially for high-rep counts, on both speal and powder-coated bars.
- Tactical: A combination of rubber on the outside and woven Kevlar on the inside. It’s my favorite type of material, but it can get rough for higher rep count workouts — especially if you don’t use chalk.
Victory Grips Styles
Besides having a choice of material, you can also choose from four different grip styles, including:
- Four finger holes: Offers the best protection because the grip covers the entire palm of your hand.
- Three finger holes: Offers reasonable protection while still allowing for some contact of the bar with the skin. I’ve been using three-finger grips for most of my CrossFit career and have never had issues with protection.
- Two finger holes: Two-finger grips are great for WODs involving rings or kettlebells, where wider grips might get in the way.
- Fingerless: Some athletes prefer a fingerless style because it allows them to quickly transition to movements where grips would get in the way (e.g., jumping rope).
As you can see, Victory Grips offers plenty of grip choices. And depending on how seriously you take CrossFit, you might even end up with more than one pair of grips in your gym bag. For a complete comparison matrix of all available grip materials and styles, check out this page.
What Makes Victory Grips My Grips of Choice?
In addition to the material quality and outstanding craftsmanship, Victory Grips offers a couple of features that sets their products apart from the competition, making them the best gymnastic grips you can buy for CrossFit.
Comfort
The first thing I noticed when putting on the grips was their ergonomic design. It naturally follows the shape of my palm, which means the fabric doesn’t bend or fold in odd places when gripping a bar.
Additionally, Victory Grips doesn’t use metal (or similar materials) to strengthen the loop where the velcro strap goes through. That’s important to avoid anything from digging into your skin. With my Bear KompleX grips, I have to use wristbands to protect my wrists from the metal loops. If I don’t, I look like I just got out of jail (thanks to the cuff marks) after a set of toes-to-bar.
Note that Victory Grips sent me a pair of wristbands to further increase the comfort of their grips. But even without them, they’re so much more comfortable to wear during workouts than the Bear KompleX.
Protection
One of the reasons athletes wear grips is to protect their skin. If you’re a professional athlete, ripped palms will impact your ability to train and compete. But even if you’re an amateur or hobby athlete (like I am), torn skin can impact your personal life by impeding your daily activities.
Just imagine a surgeon or someone who uses their hands to perform their job, and who can’t risk injuring them.
That’s why it’s important to protect your hands. Tears are not a sign of strength, just a sign of bad protection.
Victory Grips offers different models of grips based on the level and area of protection you need. You can get the best protection from either the three-finger or the fingerless styles, because they cover your entire palm.
The two-finger and three-finger models provide slightly less protection, depending on your grip and the areas you are prone to tear at.
I’ve used three-finger grips for most of my CrossFit career and only ripped where my bare skin was exposed once or twice.
The other unique feature Victory Grips offers is false grip protection. The extra fabric that protects the outside of your palms when performing ring muscle-ups makes the movement a lot more comfortable (especially if you’re not used to it).
Aside from being comfortable and providing protection, performance is another important factor when choosing grips.
A good set of grips can help you perform more reps by taking some of the load (from your body weight) off your fingers and shifting it to the straps around your wrists, while allowing you to maintain close contact with the bar.
For that to work, your grips have to be long enough to create a fold that wraps around the bar. That’s called the dowel effect.
Most of the grips that I’ve seen or used from other brands aren’t long enough to create a dowel effect; they don’t provide the fold you need in order to wrap the grip around the bar and take the load off your fingers.
Victory Grips are longer than competing designs to ensure that you have enough fabric to create that fold.
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Note: Make sure to use Victory Grips’ sizing chart. And if you’re in between sizes, go with the larger one. I ended up with mostly 2XL (and some XL) grips, which look gigantic but provide the best dowel effect for the size of my hands.
Price
The leather and synthetic Victory Grips cost $45, while the Tactical grips (made out of rubber and woven Kevlar) cost $55. That’s pretty much in line with other brands (Bear KompleX runs between $40 and $50) and very reasonable considering the grips are made in the U.S. using high-quality materials and craftsmanship.
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Victory Grips Review
Here’s a detailed review of each of the grips I’ve been using over the past few weeks. Keep in mind that some of the factors I mention below are based on my individual workout style and environmental factors (such as the inability to use chalk).
Men’s Tactical Three-Finger
I absolutely love Victory’s tactical grips and consider them the best grips I’ve ever used. The primary reason for that is because they literally stick to the bar, even without the use of chalk.
To accomplish that feat, Victory uses rubber as the primary outside material. That significantly increases friction and improves your grip. The inside is covered with woven Kevlar, which is not only abrasion-resistant but also moisture-wicking.
The problem with combining non-slip rubber on the outside and abrasion-resistant Kevlar on the inside is that your skin can suffer during high-repetition workouts, especially if you don’t apply chalk to your skin before putting on the grips.
Think about it; the non-slip rubber on the outside transfers most of the rotational energy to the inside where your skin will start rubbing against the Kevlar as you fatigue and your grip weakens. The resulting sliding movement of your palms against the inside of the grips can cause friction and abrasions (without the use of chalk).
I haven’t had any issues. But I loaned the grips to my workout buddy for a high-rep WOD, and he ripped his hands towards the end. On the bright side, he never felt like his grip was weakening — only his skin was.
So if I had to do a workout like Murph or Cindy, I’d use chalk on the inside of the grips or switch to another material (such as leather).
The only problem I had with these gloves occurred during a workout where I accidentally got a ton of sweat onto the grips. When that happened, they started getting slippery and I didn’t have any chalk or a towel available to remedy the issue. So make sure to keep them dry on the outside, especially on bare steel bars!
Men’s Stealth Three-Finger
If you’re looking for grips that offer an almost bare-handed feel while providing full protection, the Stealth grips are a great option. What I really like about them is that I can throw them in the washing machine (on the gentle cycle) and hang them to dry.
The downside of the Stealth grips is that you need chalk for optimal performance. I’ve tried them without chalk on a bare steel bar and the performance was below that of the Tactical grips (as I had expected). But if you’re allowed to use chalk, both the three-hole and four-hole versions of these grips offer excellent performance and protection, especially on powder-coated bars.
(Note: This item has been discontinued).
Men’s X2 Freedom
The X2 is very similar to the Stealth and shares many of its characteristics. However, the microfiber material of the X2 is thicker (2.2 mm vs. 1.7 mm), but compresses down to 1.7 mm when you hang on the bar.
That extra thickness and compression increases the comfort and protection of the grips, especially during workouts with high rep counts.
The other difference between the X2 and the Stealth grips is that the X2 performs better on bare steel bars because of a higher coefficient of friction.
What I liked about the X2 Freedom grips is how quickly I could transition between movements by simply folding them back with the opposite hand, thanks to the thick X2 fabric.
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Two-Finger X2 (Unisex)
The two-finger X2 shares the same material as the X2 Freedom but offers two finger holes. This makes the grips look more like traditional gymnastic grips.
I recently used these grips for a workout that involved burpee pull-ups and kettlebell swings, and they performed exceptionally well — even without the use of chalk.
What’s so great about these grips is that they allow parts of your palm to come into direct contact with the pull-up bar. Some athletes like that because they feel like they have more control over their grip and the movement.
I also like that the narrower X2 grips don’t get in the way at all during kettlebell swings where you have both hands on the curved handle.
My recommendation is to use the two-finger X2 grips for movements involving rings, kettlebells or fast transitions (you can also fold them back relatively easily).
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Men’s Leather Freedom
I love leather because it’s a natural material that feels great on my skin. After the initial break-in period, it almost becomes one with my palm. It’s also the traditional grip material that many athletes have come to love.
One of the reasons why leather is such an excellent material for gymnastics grips is because it provides excellent protection for beat up and sore hands. Plus, it performs exceptionally well on bare steel bars.
The downside of leather is that it stretches over time (up to half an inch) and thus has a limited lifespan of about six months, depending on the workout volume. On average, I use grips only two times a week, so I expect mine to last much longer than half a year.
Note that leather grips have a short break-in period. The best way to expedite that process (besides using them) is to apply chalk inside and out and then rub your hands together to loosen the fibers.
Speaking of chalk and fibers, Victory Grips recommends using a wire brush from time to time to remove any chalk that has accumulated in the leather.
My recommendation is to use leather grips if your box has steel bars and if you like how leather feels on your skin.
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False Grip Strap
While they’re not actual grips, I also wanted to mention the false grip straps Victory Grips offers.
They look like someone cut off a pair of grips and left only the velcro loop and a small patch of fabric. That small patch protects the side of your palm that’s in contact with the rings during movements that benefit from a “false grip,” such as ring muscle-ups.
But you might be wondering why you wouldn’t just use regular gymnastics grips. Well, ring muscle-ups are a technically difficult movement and many athletes prefer direct contact with the rings. However, using a false grip can be very uncomfortable and painful, especially if you’re not used to it.
That’s where false grip straps can help. They offer a bit of a cushion and protection while still allowing you to grip the rings with your bare hands.
I recommend using these wrist straps if you’re just learning how to perform ring muscle-ups using a false grip.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why You Should Get a Pair of Victory Grips
For the past three years, I’ve been recommending Bear KompleX to anyone who asked me what grips I use. They were the best grips that I knew of.
When my wife got a pair of Victory Grips, she told me, after her first workout with them, that she’d be returning her Bear KompleX because the Victory Grips were so much better.
I couldn’t believe it — until I got to use Victory Grips myself. The difference was like night and day! I admit that under perfect conditions, including powder-coated bars and a brick of chalk to dig your hands and grips into, the difference might be less severe.
But guess what: we don’t have perfect conditions all the time. That’s particularly true when you participate in competitions at other gyms that might have the most slippery bars you’ve laid your hands on, or that don’t allow community chalk.
Performance aside, I’ve found no grips that provide the same level of comfort and ergonomic design as Victory Grips. I’ve become a true believer in this brand and its products, and I’ll be wholeheartedly recommending Victory Grips going forward.
If you have any questions about Victory Grips or how I use them, feel free to leave me a comment below or shoot me an and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
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