Do Thick Grips Help With Arm Wrestling?

Arm wrestling looks like an arm sport. The athletes at the top of it train like complete lifters, and the reasons why say a lot about how strength actually works.

Table of Contents

• Arm Wrestling Is Not Just an Arm Sport
• The End of the Arm Specialist Era
• The Georgians and the Russians: The New Blueprint
• Top Roll, Hook, and King's Move: What Each Style Demands
• Wrist Strength and the Ability to Rise
• The Handles Arm Wrestlers Train With
• Where Thick Grips Fit in Arm Wrestling Training
• Arm Wrestling Demands at a Glance
• Frequently Asked Questions
• The Bottom Line

Arm Wrestling Is Not Just an Arm Sport

Watch a super heavyweight match at full speed and the name of the sport starts to feel misleading. The action runs through the entire body. The hit off the referee's go comes from the legs and hips driving into the table. The pull that follows is a rowing motion, lats and upper back dragging the opponent's hand across the pin line. Side pressure recruits the chest and shoulder the way a press does. The core braces everything, transferring force from the lower body into a single hand.

The arm is where the match is decided, but it is the last link in a chain that starts at the floor. This is why the sport's training culture has changed so dramatically over the past decade, and why the athletes now dominating it look less like arm specialists and more like strongmen who happen to compete on a table.

The End of the Arm Specialist Era

For most of the sport's modern history, the model was specialization. John Brzenk, the most decorated arm wrestler of his generation and the standard against which the sport still measures greatness, built his legacy on table skill, tendon strength, and arm-specific conditioning rather than heavy barbell work. Devon Larratt, the Canadian legend who carried the sport into the mainstream, became famous for relentless arm-specific volume, enormous amounts of table time and connective tissue work aimed squarely at the pulling arm.

That approach produced champions, and Larratt is still competing at the top of the sport today. But as a development model for the next generation, the pure arm specialist era is fading. The athletes rising now are built differently. They squat, they deadlift, they bench, and they treat the compound lifts as the base that arm-specific work sits on top of. Their physiques reflect it: balanced, thick through the back and legs, not just oversized forearms attached to an ordinary frame.

The logic is simple. When two athletes have comparable hands, the one with the stronger body wins the positions between the grip and the pin. Full body strength is what lets an arm wrestler hold a losing angle, recover from a bad start, and keep applying pressure deep into a long match.

The Georgians and the Russians: The New Blueprint

No one embodies the new model like Levan Saginashvili. The Georgian Hulk is a seven-time world champion, the reigning East vs West Super Heavyweight champion, and widely regarded as the strongest arm wrestler in history. He is also, by any definition, a complete strength athlete. His training footage shows heavy rows, presses, cheat curls with loads most lifters cannot deadlift, and strongman-style carries, all alongside his table work.

Just as telling is the man across the table from him. Irakli Zirakashvili, Saginashvili's training partner, competes around 95 kilograms, roughly half of Levan's size, and takes on the intense task of sparring with the Georgian Hulk in practice. In the gym, Zirakashvili keeps up with or even out-lifts Levan on certain movements, which is why many in the sport consider him the strongest pound for pound arm wrestler alive. A 95 kilogram athlete does not survive daily rounds against the strongest arm wrestler in history on forearm training alone. He does it with a base of full body strength that his weight class opponents simply do not have.

The Russian school told the same story a generation earlier. Denis Cyplenkov, the man with perhaps the most famous hands in the sport's history, came up through strongman competition. He benched heavy, he curled loads that became internet legend, and his training mixed pressing, pulling, and event work long before it narrowed to the table. His dominance was never just about his hands. It was about the mass and pressing power behind them.

The pattern across all of them is consistent. Chest, shoulders, triceps, back, and legs are not accessories to arm wrestling strength. They are where a large share of it comes from.

New to grip training?

This article assumes some familiarity with thick bar training and grip equipment. For the full breakdown of grip tools and the science behind how they work, start with The Complete Guide to Gym Grips.

Top Roll, Hook, and King's Move: What Each Style Demands

The top roll

The top roll is the technician's style. The attacker climbs the opponent's hand, rolls their knuckles high, and attacks the fingers and wrist, forcing the opponent's hand open and their wrist back. It demands pronation strength, back pressure, and above all the ability to rise, cupping the wrist toward yourself against resistance. The power source behind it is a rowing motion: lats and upper back pulling the opponent's arm toward your side of the table while the hand does its work.

The hook

The hook is the power style. Both athletes turn their wrists inward and the match becomes a direct contest of side pressure, dragging the opponent's arm sideways toward the pin pad. The biceps and forearm carry the load at the arm, but the drive comes from the chest and shoulder pressing across the body, closer to a fly or a press than a curl. Strong hookers are almost always strong pressers, and the shoulder press move, driving forward with the shoulder stacked behind the gripped hands, turns the match into something close to a literal press.

The king's move

The king's move is the defensive style, popularized by Michael Todd and more recently employed by Devon Larratt in his super heavyweight matches. The athlete drops their body low under the table line, extending the arm into a braced position that is extremely difficult to pin. From there, the match becomes a full body pulling contest. Escaping or winning from the king's move means dragging your own bodyweight and the opponent's pressure back up through the lats, posterior chain, and core. It may be the clearest demonstration in the sport that arm wrestling is a pulling discipline, not a curling one.

Wrist Strength and the Ability to Rise

Here is the part that surprises lifters coming to the sport from the gym: crushing grip strength is not important in arm wrestling. The referee sets the grip palm to palm before the match starts, and no amount of squeezing force pins an opponent. What decides matches at the hand is something different: wrist strength, factored with forearm strength, and specifically the ability to rise.

Rising means cupping the wrist toward yourself while an opponent applies force in the opposite direction. The athlete whose wrist rises controls the angle of both hands, and the athlete whose wrist gets stretched back loses their leverage no matter how strong the rest of their arm is. Alongside rising, the hand's job is isometric: resisting the opponent's attempt to open the fingers and peel the hand apart during a top roll. That is holding strength through the wrist and fingers under brutal static load, which is a completely different quality from crushing a gripper shut.

This distinction matters for training. Squeezing tools build a quality the sport barely uses. What transfers is loaded wrist work, thick handle holds, wrist curls and cupping movements, pronation work, and heavy pulling and pressing done through a hand that has to stabilize the load. Strength at the wrist, built on a strong forearm, built on a strong body. That is the stack.

The Handles Arm Wrestlers Train With

Walk into a dedicated arm wrestling gym and the wall of handles tells you what the sport values. The main categories for armwrestling handles:

• Revolving thick handles. The Rolling Thunder is the classic example: a free-spinning thick handle loaded for deadlift-style lifts and timed holds. Because the handle rotates, the hand and wrist must do all the stabilizing, building exactly the isometric holding strength the sport runs on.
• Cylindrical fat grips. Clip-on thick grips that convert any bar or dumbbell to a thick handle. Arm wrestlers use them for holds, heavy pulls, and general forearm overload, and for pulling work the uniform cylinder is the right shape for the job, as covered in our comparison of the two thick grip designs.
• Cone and eccentric handles. Tapered or offset handles that shift load toward the fingers or thumb, mimicking the uneven pressure of an opponent climbing your hand in a top roll.
• Wrist cupping and rise handles. Cable and belt attachments angled so that resistance fights the wrist directly, training the rise against band, cable, or plate resistance.
• Pronation and supination setups. Strap, belt, and leverage bar arrangements that load rotation, the top roller's other weapon.
• Wrist rollers. The old standby for forearm endurance, rolling a hanging load up and down.

Every one of these tools shares a theme: load delivered through the hand at challenging angles, forcing the wrist and forearm to stabilize while bigger muscles produce the force. Which is also a precise description of what a thick grip does to a barbell.

Where Thick Grips Fit in Arm Wrestling Training

This is where the two halves of this article meet. Modern arm wrestlers need two things from their gym work: a full body strength base built on compound lifts, and hands, wrists, and forearms that are conditioned by every rep of that base rather than trained as an afterthought. Thick bar training delivers both at once. Adding a thick grip to pressing, curling, and wrist work raises the demand on the hand and forearm on every set, while the muscle irradiation effect increases activation through the chest, shoulders, and triceps behind it. The arm wrestler's chest and shoulder work is not separate from their hand work. With a thick grip, it is the same set.

The Optimo Pro has a specific relevance here that a plain cylinder does not. Its contoured design places an anatomical palm support directly against the palm, so the hand closes around a shape that pushes back where the load actually sits. That is much closer to the reality of a match than a bare bar is. In arm wrestling, the resistance is another hand clasped against yours, filling your palm and driving into it, the way two hands grab on together. A thick grip that cradles the palm and molds to the hand recreates that loading pattern under a barbell or dumbbell.

The carryover is most direct on the moves that press. Side pressure in the hook and the shoulder press attack both drive force through the palm, chest and shoulder behind a loaded hand. Bench pressing, overhead pressing, and dumbbell work with the Optimo Pro load the same path: pressing force traveling through a supported palm while the wrist holds its line. Add wrist curls, hammer curls, and reverse curls with the Pro and the rise gets trained under the same palm-loaded conditions. For heavy deadlift-style pulls and timed holds, keep the cylinder or a revolving handle, that is their territory. The Pro's territory is the pressing and arm work where the palm is the interface, which for an arm wrestler is where matches are won.

A world champion's first impression

Michael Todd has held the product in his hands. The multi-time world champion who popularized the king's move reviewed the Optimo One, which shares the same anatomical design as the Pro, and his reaction on first use was immediate: he could feel the contoured shape working and the pressure coming off his joints. Coming from an athlete whose entire career runs through the elbow and wrist, that first impression carries weight. The full review is short, one to two minutes:

Programming note

Our Fat Grip Training Guide covers how to structure thick grip work within a complete program, and the Fat Grip Bench Press Guide goes deep on the pressing side specifically.

Arm Wrestling Demands at a Glance

 

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should arm wrestlers train?

Less often than the sport's most famous outlier suggests. Devon Larratt's near-daily volume is frequently copied, but he is an elite athlete with exceptional recovery, and daily high-intensity work is a fast route to tendon injuries for most people. Muscles in the hand and forearm recover quickly, but the tendons and ligaments that arm wrestling loads hardest adapt far more slowly. Most competitive pullers run two to three focused sessions per week plus table time, and any routine you can sustain for years without injury will outperform an optimal program that breaks you down. Thick bar training helps here too, since it conditions the hands and wrists inside the pressing and arm work you already do rather than requiring separate high-frequency sessions.

Is crushing grip strength important in arm wrestling?

No, and this is one of the most misunderstood things about the sport. The referee sets the grip palm to palm, and squeezing force does not move an opponent's arm. What matters at the hand is wrist strength factored with forearm strength: the ability to rise, to hold pronation, and to resist the opponent opening your fingers. That is isometric holding strength through the wrist and hand, a different quality from crushing.

Do arm wrestlers only train their arms?

Not anymore. The specialists of the previous era built champions on arm-specific volume and table time, but the current generation, led by athletes like Levan Saginashvili and his training partner Irakli Zirakashvili, trains squats, deadlifts, presses, and rows as the base underneath their table work. Denis Cyplenkov came to the sport from strongman competition for the same reason. Full body strength wins the positions between the grip and the pin.

Is table time more important than lifting weights?

For learning the sport, yes. Arm wrestling is a skill sport, and live table time is the only thing that builds technique and conditions the tendons in the exact positions a match loads them. This is why experienced pullers routinely beat far stronger gym athletes. The gym's role is different: table time reveals your weaknesses, and lifting is the controlled, recoverable way to strengthen them between sessions. The athletes at the top of the sport treat the two as one system, table work layered on top of a full body strength base.

What is the king's move?

A defensive technique popularized by Michael Todd and used more recently by Devon Larratt, where the athlete drops low under the table line into a braced, extended-arm position that is very hard to pin. Fighting out of it is a full body pulling effort through the lats, posterior chain, and core, which is why it rewards complete athletes over pure arm specialists.

How do thick grips help arm wrestling training?

Thick bar training loads the wrist and forearm on every rep of the compound lifts arm wrestlers already do, while increasing activation through the chest, shoulders, and triceps behind the hand. The Optimo Pro's anatomical palm support adds match specificity: it fills and loads the palm the way an opponent's hand does, so side pressure and pressing strength get built through the same palm-loaded pattern they are used in.

The Bottom Line

Arm wrestling was never really an arm sport. It is a full body strength contest funneled through a single hand, and the modern era has made that impossible to ignore. The athletes at the top squat, deadlift, bench, and row, and their arm-specific work sits on top of that base rather than replacing it. What separates them at the hand is not crushing force but wrist strength, the ability to rise, and a forearm that can hold angles under brutal load.

For lifters training toward the sport, that points to a clear approach: build the compound lifts, load the hand and wrist on every rep you can, and train pressing strength through the palm, because that is how it arrives in a match. Thick bar training does all three at once, and the Optimo Pro was designed around exactly the palm-loaded pattern the sport runs on.

References

World Armwrestling Federation championship records and East vs West Super Heavyweight Championship results, Levan Saginashvili competition record.

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 train the way the sport actually works? Explore the Optimo Pro and Optimo One.