Can Rowing Improve Your Grip Strength?

Grip strength is often underestimated in its importance, but it plays a crucial role in your daily activities and fitness routines. Whether it’s lifting weights or grocery bags, a strong grip enhances your ability to perform everyday tasks with ease and efficiency. 

As you seek out ways to improve your physical fitness, rowing is often praised for being a highly effective full-body workout that engages multiple muscle groups, including those responsible for your grip. But the question remains: Can rowing effectively improve grip strength? 

Let’s dive into how rowing works and its potential benefits for building grip strength. This article will cover:

• What is grip strength, and why does it matter? 

• How grip is used during the rowing stroke

• Can rowing alone build grip strength? 

• Ways to maximize grip strength gains with rowing

What is grip strength, and why does it matter? 

Grip strength refers to the force exerted by the hand to grasp or hold an object. It is a critical component of functional fitness and plays a significant role in a wide range of physical activities. Whether you're lifting weights, rock climbing, or playing tennis, a strong grip is essential for maintaining control, performing lifts properly, and reducing the risk of injury.

Grip strength is not only important in the gym; it’s also vital for everyday tasks. Activities such as opening jars, carrying heavy bags, or even typing and texting on your phone can become much more challenging without sufficient grip strength.

In terms of fitness, improving your grip strength can enhance athletic performance, increase stability, and lower the risk of injury. It also contributes to overall hand health, which is especially beneficial for athletes, older adults, and individuals with chronic conditions that affect hand mobility.

How grip is used during the rowing stroke

Rowing is a unique exercise because it builds both cardiovascular endurance and muscular strength in the upper body, lower body, and core. Throughout the rowing stroke, your hands must maintain a firm grip on the oars or handle, allowing you to generate force while maintaining control over the movement.

The rowing motion is broken down into four phases: the Catch, the Drive, the Finish, and the Recovery. At each phase, grip plays a role in maintaining stability and ensuring proper technique:

• Catch: At the Catch, the hands are fully extended with a firm but relaxed grip on the oars or handle. This is when the muscles in your forearms, wrists, and hands engage to secure your grip before initiating the drive phase.

• Drive: After you have pushed through the foot stretcher to extend your legs and swing your body back, your arms must pull the handle toward your chest. Throughout the Drive, your grip must withstand the force generated by your body to ultimately pull the handle toward you. 

• Finish: Once the handle reaches your chest, your grip relaxes but continues to play a role in maintaining control of the oars or handle as you transition into the Recovery phase.

• Recovery: As you extend your arms and prepare for the next stroke, your grip should once again become firm but relaxed to maintain control of the oars or handle into the Catch.

Rowing requires consistent engagement of the grip muscles throughout each stroke. The effort required to pull the handle and control the movement effectively can help improve grip strength over time, especially when rowing regularly.

Can rowing alone build grip strength?

While rowing can certainly help improve grip endurance, relying on rowing alone to build significant grip strength may not be sufficient. The intensity and nature of the rowing stroke primarily target grip endurance rather than maximal grip strength. Although beneficial, rowing’s emphasis is more on sustaining a grip over time. Additionally, proper rowing technique encourages a relaxed yet firm grip, without overemphasizing excessive gripping of the handle.

Maximal grip strength is the ability to exert the most force possible with your hands and fingers, and to achieve this, you need specific exercises that focus on isolating and strengthening the muscles involved in gripping. Rowing, though a great full-body workout, involves many other muscles that assist in the movement (such as the back, legs, and core), which means the load placed on the forearms and hands is spread out.

That said, if your goal is to improve grip endurance—the ability to maintain a grip over a longer period of time or across multiple strokes—then rowing is an excellent exercise to include in your routine. For those who are looking to build strength specifically in their grip, it might be best to complement rowing with additional exercises focused on grip strength.

Ways to maximize grip strength gains with rowing

If you’re serious about maximizing your grip strength through rowing, there are a few strategies you can use to enhance the impact of your rowing workouts:

1. Focus on intensity

Increasing the intensity of your rowing workouts will place more demand on your grip. Higher watts (lower splits), and higher rhythm (stroke rate) will challenge your grip muscles more. High-intensity intervals can help recruit more muscle fibers in your forearms and hands, promoting greater strength gains. 

That being said, you should still focus on keeping your grip as relaxed as possible throughout the rowing stroke, as overgripping can expedite feelings of fatigue in the upper body. 

2. Do longer rows

Try rowing for longer durations to enhance grip endurance. The longer you row, the more time your hands will spend gripping the handle. This extended time under tension will help build grip endurance and may also stimulate some strength improvements. 

Similarly to high-intensity workouts, you should always aim to keep your grip as relaxed as possible to improve overall endurance. 

3. Include supplementary grip training

While rowing helps with grip endurance, adding specific exercises like farmer's walks, dead hangs, or wrist curls can significantly improve your overall grip strength. Incorporating these types of grip-focused exercises will allow for greater overall development of the muscles responsible for gripping.

Related blog: 10 Exercises to Improve Your Grip Strength

Ready to row?

Rowing can indeed help improve grip endurance, as it engages the hands and forearms throughout each stroke, requiring strength to hold onto the handle and maintain control of the movement. Over time, regular rowing workouts can enhance your ability to maintain a strong grip, which is important for overall physical performance.

However, for individuals looking to build maximal grip strength, it’s beneficial to supplement rowing with specific grip-strengthening exercises that target the muscles of the hands, wrists, and forearms. These exercises will complement the endurance benefits provided by rowing and contribute to a well-rounded grip strength development plan.

For those looking to integrate rowing into their fitness routines, Hydrow offers high-quality  rowing machines that simulate real-water rowing, providing an immersive experience while helping you engage multiple muscle groups, including the muscles responsible for grip. Whether you're aiming to improve your grip endurance or simply enjoy a full-body workout, rowing on a Hydrow  can be a great addition to your fitness journey.

By combining rowing with targeted grip-strength exercises, you'll be on your way to stronger, more powerful hands and forearms, enhancing both your fitness performance and daily functional tasks. Happy rowing!