Are Ergonomic Thick Grips Better Than Cylindrical Grips?

An honest comparison of the two thick grip designs, built on training data from millions of logged workouts.

Table of Contents

• The Short Answer
• The Two Designs, Defined
• Where Cylindrical Grips Are Genuinely Strong
• The Load Penalty Neither Design Escapes
• What Lifters Actually Train: The Data
• Movement by Movement: Where Each Design Wins
• Why the Ergonomic Design Wins at Scale
• Cylindrical vs Ergonomic Thick Grips at a Glance
• Frequently Asked Questions
• The Bottom Line

The Short Answer

For most lifters, yes, with one honest exception. Both designs deliver the core benefit of thick bar training, which is greater muscle activation through increased grip demand. The difference is where each design performs best. A cylindrical grip treats every exercise the same, which makes it the more stable choice on pulling movements, where an ergonomic grip's fixed orientation works against it. An ergonomic grip is shaped around how pressure actually moves through your hand, which makes it the stronger design for pressing and arm work. Training data shows that pressing and arm work make up the large majority of what lifters actually do, while heavy pulling is a small fraction of real training. That is why the ergonomic design wins for most people, most of the time.

The rest of this article makes that case in detail, including the places where the cylinder is genuinely the better tool.

The Two Designs, Defined

A cylindrical thick grip is a uniform tube of rubber or silicone that slides onto a bar or dumbbell, increasing the handle diameter to roughly 50 to 57 millimetres. Every point on its surface is identical. It has no orientation, no front or back, and no assumptions about how your hand meets it.

An ergonomic thick grip increases diameter the same way, but the surface is contoured. An anatomical palm support fills the space between the bar and the arch of your palm, the grip molds to the hand rather than forcing the hand to conform to a tube, and the shape guides the wrist into a natural line under load. The Optimo One and Optimo Pro are examples of this category.

Both produce the muscle irradiation effect that makes thick bar training work. The tension generated by gripping a thicker handle radiates through the forearms into the biceps, shoulders, and chest, activating more total muscle per rep. The research on this is consistent for both designs. The question is not whether thick grips work. It is which shape serves your training better.

New to gym grips?

This article compares the two thick grip designs specifically. For the full breakdown of all four categories of gym grips, including weight grippers and lifting straps, and the science behind why thick bar training works, start with The Complete Guide to Gym Grips.

Where Cylindrical Grips Are Genuinely Strong

An honest comparison has to start with what the cylinder does well, because it does some things well.

The intensity signal is immediate. A plain cylinder makes every set noticeably harder from the first rep. The forearm pump arrives fast, and that unmistakable feeling of increased effort is part of why cylindrical grips built the category. If your primary goal is grip overload as a training stimulus in itself, a cylinder delivers it without complication.

There is nothing to set up. A cylinder has no correct orientation. You clip it on and lift. An anatomical grip has a right way to sit in the hand, which costs a few seconds of placement and a short learning curve. For a lifter who wants zero friction, the cylinder is simpler.

It is a proven tool for dedicated grip athletes. Lifters training specifically for crushing and supporting grip strength, such as arm wrestlers and grip sport competitors, often want the rawest possible stimulus. The cylinder gives them that.

It stays put on pulling movements. Every clip-on grip has a slit where it opens to wrap around the bar. A cylinder lets you rotate that slit anywhere, including into the inside of the hand where the fingers close over it, and because the surface is uniform, there is no shape for the hand to press against. The grip stays where you put it. This makes the cylinder the better thick grip for deadlifts, lat pulldowns, and other pulls, for reasons covered in detail below.

These are real advantages. They are also advantages for a specific type of lifter, and the data below shows how narrow that type is relative to the broader training population.

The Load Penalty Neither Design Escapes

Here is the part most grip marketing avoids. Any thick grip reduces the weight you can hold on heavy pulling movements, because a thicker handle shifts the limiting factor from the target muscles to the hands. Research published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that experienced lifters reduced deadlift loads by as much as 55 percent when moving to thicker bars.

Neither design escapes this. The penalty is a function of diameter, not shape, and nobody should buy any thick grip, ours included, expecting to pull their normal deadlift numbers with it. Serious pullers use a standard bar for their heaviest work, and that is the correct way to program around it.

This matters for the comparison because it reframes the pulling question. Since the load penalty applies to both designs, what separates them on pulls is not load. It is stability, and that comparison goes to the cylinder.

What Lifters Actually Train: The Data

This is where the question stops being theoretical. StrengthLog analyzed millions of workouts from over 700,000 users of its workout tracker to find the most popular exercises by share of total sets logged. The top of the list:

1. Bench press, 9.7 percent of all logged sets
2. Squat, 7.0 percent
3. Deadlift, 5.0 percent
4. Lat pulldown, 3.8 percent
5. Overhead press, 3.4 percent
6. Barbell row, 3.2 percent

Further down the top 25 sit the barbell curl (2.1 percent), tricep pushdowns with bar and rope (3.5 percent combined), incline dumbbell press (1.9 percent), dumbbell curl (1.7 percent), dumbbell shoulder press (1.3 percent), hammer curl (1.1 percent), and dumbbell chest press (1.0 percent).

Group those by what the hand is doing and the picture is stark. Pressing movements account for roughly 17 percent of all logged sets. Direct arm work, curls and pushdowns, accounts for roughly 8 percent. The deadlift, the single movement where thick grips cost the most load, accounts for 5 percent, and the squat's 7 percent involves no grip accessory decision at all.

Fitbod's analysis of millions of its own users tells the same story from a different angle. The barbell deadlift ranks around 38th by number of lifters using it. The most logged movements are dumbbell, cable, and machine exercises: dumbbell rows and curls, lat pulldowns, dumbbell presses. Most people do not train like powerlifters. They train with moderate loads across presses, rows, and arm work.

So the real question is not which grip design is better in the abstract. It is which design is better across the roughly 25 percent of training volume that is pressing and arm work, versus the 5 percent that is heavy deadlifting. Framed that way, the answer follows from the biomechanics.

Movement by Movement: Where Each Design Wins

Pulling movements: the cylinder's win

Pulling is where the ergonomic design's defining feature works against it. The palm support fixes the grip's orientation in the hand: the contoured side must face the palm, which forces the slit to the outside. In a pulling movement like a deadlift, lat pulldown, or heavy row, the hand loads down and sideways into that contoured surface, and the exposed slit becomes a weak point. The grip can roll around the bar, shift out of position, and force readjustment mid-set.

A cylinder has neither problem. The slit can sit on the inside of the hand where the fingers close over it, and the uniform surface gives the hand nothing to press against off-axis, so the grip does not rotate. For this reason, ergonomic grips are not recommended for pulling movements at all. If you want thick grip work in your pulls, use a cylinder, accept the load reduction, and keep your heaviest sets on a standard bar either way.

Presses: the clearest ergonomic win

Pressing is where the two designs genuinely diverge, because pressing changes what your hand is doing. In a press, pressure shifts away from the fingers and concentrates in the palm. A cylinder responds to that by simply being thick, which spreads pressure somewhat but can roll in the hand and does nothing to position the wrist.

An anatomical palm support is aligned with exactly this loading pattern. The contour fills the palm where the pressing force actually travels, keeps the bar stable under load, and guides the wrist into a straighter, stronger line beneath the weight. The research already points this direction: in the same Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research study, participants reported greater comfort bench pressing with a thicker bar than with a standard bar, because the larger surface distributed palm pressure more evenly. A contoured palm support takes that mechanical advantage further than a plain tube can. Given that the bench press alone is the most logged exercise in the world and pressing collectively dominates upper body training, this is not a niche win. It is a win in the single largest category of what lifters do.

Go deeper on pressing

Our Fat Grip Bench Press Guide covers exactly how thick grips change the bench press, including load selection, programming, and what to expect in your first sessions.

Curls and accessory arm work: where satisfaction is decided

This is the sweet spot for thick grip training in general, and the biggest practical gap between the two designs. The failure mode of a cylinder on curls and direct arm work is that grip fatigue arrives before the target muscle fatigues. The set ends because your hands gave out, not because your biceps did. Lifters who bought grips specifically to build grip like this. Lifters who bought grips to build arms, which is most of them, find it cuts their working sets short.

The ergonomic contour keeps the hand secure with less crushing effort. The fingers and thumb stay engaged around the anatomical surface, the bar does not feel like it is rolling out of the hand, and the working muscle stays the limiter deeper into the set. More quality reps at the intended intensity is the entire point of adding a grip accessory to arm work, and it is the reason this category decides which design people keep using.

Why the Ergonomic Design Wins at Scale

Put the pieces together and a pattern emerges that individual product comparisons usually miss.

Thick grips as a category have a known adoption problem. The typical arc is high enthusiasm in the first weeks, driven by that immediate intensity signal, followed by declining use once the load penalty on the lifts people care about starts to feel like a tax. The grips end up in a drawer. The cylinder is fully exposed to this arc because it imposes its penalty uniformly on every movement.

The ergonomic design changes the arc because the concession and the payoff land in different places. It concedes pulling movements outright, and the data shows those are a small share of training that lifters largely keep on a standard bar anyway. The payoff is concentrated in pressing and accessory work, which is where the majority of training volume actually lives. A lifter using ergonomic grips experiences the advantage on most of their sets and the concession on almost none of them.

There is also a subtler behavioral point. Lifters do not consciously trade pulling performance for better curls and presses. Usage self-selects. Both designs naturally migrate toward the movements where they feel good, and away from the movements where they cost load. The difference is that the cylinder's best case, pure grip overload, is a niche training pattern, while the ergonomic design's best case, secure and stable work across presses, curls, and arm work, is the majority training pattern. When usage concentrates where a product is strongest, that product gets used, and a grip that gets used is the only kind worth owning.

Cylindrical vs Ergonomic Thick Grips at a Glance

Frequently Asked Questions

Do ergonomic thick grips still build grip and forearm strength?

Yes. The diameter does the work. An ergonomic grip at 1.6 or 2.25 inches demands substantially more from the hands and forearms than a standard 28 millimetre bar, and produces the same class of activation benefits the thick bar research documents. The contour changes where pressure sits, not how hard your forearms work.

Should I use any thick grip on my heaviest deadlifts?

No, and the two designs are not equal here. Research shows load reductions of up to 55 percent on the deadlift with thicker bars, so your top pulling sets belong on a standard bar regardless. If you want thick grip work in your pulls, use a cylindrical grip, whose slit can sit on the inside of the hand and stay in position. Ergonomic grips are not recommended for deadlifts, lat pulldowns, or other pulling movements, because their fixed orientation exposes the slit and the grip can shift under load. Save the ergonomic design for pressing and arm work, where its advantage is highest. Our Fat Grip Training Guide covers how to structure this within a complete program.

Is a cylindrical grip ever the better choice?

Yes, in two situations. If your training goal is grip strength as an end in itself, and you want the rawest possible overload with zero setup, a cylinder does that job. And if you want a thick grip on pulling movements, the cylinder is the only design that holds its position there. For the majority of lifters, whose training is dominated by presses, curls, and machine work, the ergonomic design performs better across more of their actual sets.

What do lifters actually train the most?

According to StrengthLog data from over 700,000 users, the bench press is the most logged exercise in the world at 9.7 percent of all sets, and pressing plus direct arm work together make up roughly a quarter of all logged training. Fitbod's user data shows the barbell deadlift ranks only around 38th by number of lifters. Most training happens in exactly the movements where ergonomic grips have their advantage.

The Bottom Line

Cylindrical grips proved that thick bar training works. They remain a legitimate tool for lifters chasing pure grip overload, and this article has been direct about their strengths, including a simplicity and a stability on pulling movements that anatomical designs cannot match.

But a training accessory should be judged against the training people actually do. The data is unambiguous: pressing and arm work dominate real-world lifting, heavy grip-limited pulls are a small slice of it, and those are precisely the conditions under which an anatomical, contoured design outperforms a uniform tube. The ergonomic grip concedes the pulls, delivers the same activation stimulus everywhere else, supports the palm where pressing load actually travels, and keeps the target muscle as the limiter through the arm work that fills most programs.

That is the case for ergonomic thick grips, and it is the design principle behind the Optimo One and Optimo Pro.

References

StrengthLog. The Most Popular Gym Exercises for Men and Women. Analysis of millions of workouts from 700,000+ users. strengthlog.com/most-popular-exercises

Fitbod. How Strong Is the Average Gym-Goer? Analysis of millions of logged workouts. fitbod.me

Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. Bar diameter, load reduction, and pressing comfort findings across six exercises and three bar diameters in experienced lifters.

Ready to add Optimo grips to your training? Explore the Optimo One and Optimo Pro.