[Blarg]

Yes, I started a long thread on it, with Captains of Crush in the title, in OOT. That would be good to look up, and also search here and on the dragondoor.com forums for "contrast baths," both with my name.

Most people cannot close the #1. But you can still train on it. Doing heavy negatives is by far the quickest way to build up strength on grippers. Use both hands to close the gripper, or push it in against your leg or hip.

BE CAREFUL. Especially as you progress up and use heavier grippers, you can put a lot of pressure on small joints closing a gripper against your hip or leg. More importantly, if you slip and are then left with just one hand gripping a gripper much too strong for you to hold closed, it's like holding a grenade and you can rip your connective tissue and muscles.

When you do heavy negatives, you can either do slow controlled releases, called "smooth outs," or you can try gripping as hard as you can, really fighting the whole way, and then let go in time to help, maybe with a second hand, release the pressure more quickly. You can do heavy negatives with grippers far too tough for one hand

You can expect to see truly astonishing results in as little as a couple of weeks. Your hand can take really brutal work-outs and recover very quickly. You can speed this up even more dramatically by using contrast baths, which are a hand rehabilitation therapy using alternating dips in hot and cold water to force circulation. That helps clear out metabolic wastes from exercising and provide the material to rebuild tissue, especially important for an area of the body that has so many ligaments and tendons, which heal and rebuild much slower than muscle does. You can go from painfully sore and borderline injury in your hands from fanatical gripper work-outs to feeling fine and ready to go again the next day. Doing this, you can have many gripper work-outs per week, dramatically decreasing the time it takes to increase your grip strength.

I'd recommend one gripper below what you can do, one at right about your level, and one above, to start. Warm up with the light one and use it as a variation from strength work every once in a while, to give the tendons and ligaments some time to catch up from your intensive strength training. It also forces micro-vascularity, which helps a lot with endurance(helps on deadlifts) and healing. Sooner or later you should schedule in lighter use periods out of respect for the fact that that your muscle strength will quickly outstrip the ability of your ligaments and tendons to keep up with it, making eventual injury become a real possibility. We can surge ahead, but we need to cycle back down for balance once in a while.

Use the heavy one for negatives. Note that you can use VERY heavy ones for negatives, even so heavy that you can't close them all the way with two hands. But anyone who is not already a grip freak or doesn't have a demanding job using their grip will probably be fine with a #2 for their heavy negative gripper. Get the Trainer and the #1 and the #2 for a good starter set. The lighter grippers will still be very useful for warming up after you outgrow them, and ones that are still way way beyond you are still fine for partial close negatives, so you won't be wasting money. Especially if you do negatives and regular contrast baths, expect to see amazing results.

Note: If I had to get only one gripper for strength training for the average guy, it would be a #2, which will be sufficient for heavy negatives, your most useful strength training in gripping.