As you progress in your lifting and in your pulls, you will need to use some kind of an aid with your grips, especially if you’re doing rack pulls, if you’re doing heavy shrugs or if you’re doing a lot of volume on your pulls. Sometimes just alternating the grip or hook gripping is not a good idea because of the positions that the bar will start in, or just general fatigue in your hands. So what you’ll do is you’ll use straps.

There’s a few different kinds of straps:

• Super thick and not tacked together at the end. It’s just the long strip.
• Made out of seat belt material, so seat belt webbing and if you have children that are now past the age of being in car seats, it’s cutting up their car seats. It works real well. 18 inches or so is a good length for this kind of stuff.
• A pair of leather straps that are actually tacked together at the end. Leather straps are cool because they kind of mold to your skin.
• Speed straps. These are much shorter but they’re also tacked together at the end.

Straps shouldn´t have a loop that runs one of the ends through the strap. That’s kind of what you’ll commonly see in most sporting goods stores and that’s what you don’t want because using that kind of a strap will tighten up as you’re progressing through your set. You want to be able to get off of the bar quickly if you need to, and when you let go of the grip, you want the straps that come off along with your hands.

If you have a pair of straps that are not tacked together at the end (they’re just strips of material), you’ll loop it around.

1. Put it down on your hand, not way up on the wrist. Down on the hand is where you want it to be.
2. Then you’ll take the ends and put it between your fingers.
3. Take your non-dominant hand first. Take the material under the bar, roll it back on itself and then take your grip.
4. On the other side, since you now you have your dominant hand, it should be a little bit easier and you can twist to hold that off.
5. When you’re done with your set, if you let go with a bar, straps come off with the bar.

There’s one element that some lifters struggle with when it comes to using these kinds of straps. When you take the strap and you wrap it around, you only need to wrap it around once. Thusly, that is a secure grip. What you don’t want to do is take this and continue to wrap it all the way around, and then grab all of that material because look how much more surface area this. How much fatter that makes your barbell. One revolution will work just fine and that is a perfectly secure grip. So just remember you only have to wrap around once. Just leave the excess hanging out.

An important thing to remember when you’re using straps is that your grip will still be gripping the bar as tightly as possible. A common thing that people will do is they’ll use the straps and then they’ll stop gripping the bar and they’ll start to jerk the bar. That can create problems with back position or you can even injure your shoulders with it. So make sure that you’re using the straps as an aid. You’re not using it to actually hold the bar for you. Grip the bar as tight as you can and just let the straps do their thing without you really thinking about it.

Bibliographic references:

• Starting Strength. (2018). How to Use Straps [Video file]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/qeIJjDXUbOc?si=95vtxcrDG6t1lhVW
• Starting Strength. (2021). A Quick Tip for using Straps on Your Pulls with Brent Carter [Video file]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/uyLPSukgOu8?si=HeNrpwqPNXJIvT3D