[Blarg]

I read someone saying that his wrist thickened about half an inch, and the wrist has no muscle, so that must have come from the combined effect of his tendons getting thicker at the wrist. I'm sure that means your wrist gets much stronger.

As to forearms, I'm only working on the #1, which is a little beyond my ability, as is common for people into training on these grippers hardcore, and I can definitely feel it going up my forearms, in both the muscles and tendons.

You can feel it in your forearms a little bit if you twist your hand off a perfectly even plane with your forearms on even the cheapo store-bought plastic grippers, or if you use them for a ton of repetitions, but on these much harder grippers you can feel it a lot sooner. Closing these things is HARD.

Luckily, my looking around the web has shown me that there are a handful of different quality manufacturers now making these super-tough grippers, with all different ranges, so you can easily find a gripper challenging enough for you whether you're freakishly strong or weak or anything in between. For instance, the Captains of Crush grippers go at 60, 80, 100, 140, 195, 285, and 365 pounds of pressure to close, and different manufacturers make ones that vary between those setpoints too, each maker varying by 10 or 20 pounds from the next guy. So you're well covered for your particular strength no matter what it is.

And if you check out places like Ironmind.com, you'll see there are all kinds of different devices made to train grip around -- and there are ones that Ironmind doesn't have, too. This whole thing is way bigger than I had thought possible -- closing these grippers and doing various other feats of hand strength are actually becomoing a sport. Anyway, no matter how you are thinking of working your hands, forearms, and wrists and how strong or weak you are, there are devices of some sort to address every little aspect of it. And the field isn't all that full of hype, either -- the stuff you can buy is actually really productive, and much of it is fairly cheap.