How To Get Bigger Hands?
Reading Time: 11 minutes Our hands are used by us every single day, for a whole host of different reasons.
We use them for everything, often without even thinking, and although we may take them for granted, we still find that, without them, we really would be stuck.
Our hands allow us to pick objects up, they enable us to play games, to play with our children, to exercise, work, to play sports, and a whole lot more besides, if you catch our drift?
As beneficial and useful as they can be, those with smaller hands tend to struggle more than people with bigger hands.
If you struggle with small hands, you might be wondering how to get bigger hands, and for good reason too. If you’re physically active for example, you’ll know that people with smaller hands tend to have a poorer grip.
When lifting weights, this can be a real problem. People with small hands find that their grip strength is below average which can make it harder to lift heavier weights and perform exercises such as deadlifts.
The good news for all of our fellow small-handed readers out there, is the fact that it has been scientifically proven to increase the size of your hands naturally.
Is It Possible To Get Bigger Hands?
Yes, it absolutely is possible to get bigger hands.
For many years, and even now in fact, people were convinced that your hand size was purely down to genetics, just like things like height, eye colour, hair colour, and so on.
As more research was carried out, however, experts began noticing that it was in fact possible to increase the size of a person’s hands naturally.
Don’t get us wrong, having big hands isn’t all sunshine and rainbows.
Typing on a keyboard, doing fiddly DIY, and finding gloves that actually fit can be a real pain in the backside. When you weigh up the pros and cons with one another, however, you’ll find that most people would rather have big hands than small hands.
Thanks to the research carried out by a German surgeon called Julius Wolff, it was discovered that, with the help of specially designed movements and exercises for the hands and the surrounding muscles, not only could you increase the size of the muscles in your hands, but you can also increase the bone mineral density of bones in your hands, and therefore naturally make your hands bigger.
If you’re familiar with bodybuilding, powerlifting, strongman, arm wrestling, or any other strength sport, you may have noticed how thick and wide some of these athletes are.
People that lift heavy weights and carry out resistance training on a regular basis often find that their bodies look larger due to the fact that their bone density has increased.
Bigger Hands, Ligaments, And Tendons
It isn’t just bone density in the hands that can increase their overall size and appearance of them. Athletes that grab bats or racquets, I.E tennis players or baseball players, also usually have larger hands because they spend so many hours a week gripping a handle.
Gripping things tightly for a long duration of time has been found to give a person the appearance of having bigger hands. Now, get your minds out of the gutters, you know exactly what we meant.
Surgeons around the globe have discovered that continual intense traction in and around the hands can help to strengthen and elongate the ligaments and tendons in the hands, which will also help to make the hands look bigger and increase in size.
Have you ever wondered why people who did manual labour for work usually end up with big hands?
Take one look at an older man with large hands and you can probably safely assume that he worked a job requiring many years of manual labour and hard graft in the past.
We’re not saying that doing a bit of DIY around the house on the occasional Sunday each month will give you hands like shovels, but the more you work for the hands and keep them busy, the larger they will grow.
Exercises To Get Bigger Hands
Forgetting what people say about it is down to genetics and how-to-hand exercises and grip exercises are a waste of time because that’s not the case.
By all means, ask them to kindly back up their “facts” with scientific evidence, but if they can’t, kindly ask them to be quiet and keep their ridiculous opinions to themselves.
It is possible to get bigger hands, and we’re about to show you how. Here are several exercises and tips to help you to get bigger hands.
Use A Hand Gripper
You’ve all seen one of these before. Even if you don’t know what a hand gripper is, you’ll have seen one in the past, somewhere, either at a gym or a friend or family member’s house.
Hand grippers, which have been popular for many decades, are very simple in design and were created to improve grip strength. The device is basically two small metal rod handles attached together that you try to squeeze closed together, and hold them closed. By squeezing the handles together you’re working the muscles, tendons, and ligaments in your hands and wrists.
The main downside to these hand grippers is the fact that, as they are so simple and are designed primarily to be used at home as you relax, some of them absolutely suck. You can get grippers with offer different forces of resistance. Obviously the more resistance, the harder the exercise will be to perform. This usually means that the gripper itself, however, will be of a better quality.
If you’re new to using hand grippers, look for a fairly low-resistance gripper, offering something like 140 pounds.
As you get used to using the device, and as your hands get bigger and stronger, however, you can increase the resistance and work up to something like a 300-pound option.
Make sure you get a gripper with strong handles that are well-padded.
The last thing you want is to be getting blisters from gripping the handles too tightly. If you regularly use a hand gripper, you’ll find that your grip strength increases, your hands get bigger, your forearms get bigger and stronger, and you’ll even get more vascular hands in the process. Best of all is the fact that they can be used anywhere, and don’t cost very much money at all.
Squeezing A Tennis Ball Or Soft Ball
As you have probably gathered from the above, squeezing exercises are very much at the forefront of any hand-strengthening exercise regime.
While hand grippers are all well and good, they can only do so much, and they certainly aren’t for everybody.
If you want to try something different, why not take a tennis ball or a softball, and squeeze that in your hands instead?
Squeezing the tennis/softball will work your wrist muscles, forearms, and tendons and ligaments in your hands. Not only will this help to stretch and elongate them, but it will also help to make your grip stronger and more effective as well.
Simply take a tennis/softball in your hand and squeeze it repeatedly for several minutes. Start off slowly, gradually squeeze harder and tighter, and hold the squeeze for longer.
Repeat this process for several minutes on each hand, and after a couple of weeks, you should begin to notice a very slight increase in grip strength and possibly even hand size. As you keep this up, these effects will gradually become more and more noticeable.
Sandbags
Sandbags aren’t just used in the military, or for preventing flooding, they’re also very effective when used as part of a workout regime.
If you’ve ever tried picking up a sandbag, you’ll know just how awkward it is.
Because the bags are full of sand, as you pick them up the sand moves and makes it very awkward for you to carry. This is where you need to really grip the bag to stop it from falling.
If you want to work on your grip strength and make your hands bigger and stronger in the process, sandbags are very useful indeed.
Not only can you lift the sandbags and grip them in your hands, you could even get yourself a sand-filled punching bag and hit it. This again will help strengthen your hands and wrists.
Punching Bags
As we just mentioned, sand-filled punching bags are great for strengthening the hands and knuckles, but they aren’t the only type of punch bag that you could benefit from. Regular punching bags are also very useful.
Simply invest in a good-quality punching bag and ensure you fit it safely and securely. Next, repeatedly punch the punching bag, making sure to work on your technique and be safe.
Not only do punching bags help strengthen your wrists and your hands, but they’re also a wonderful source of cardiovascular exercise so you can burn more calories and lose weight while using them.
Some Shaolin monks use what is known as the ‘Iron Palm’ technique, which is where a sandbag is filled with rice, metal beads, sand, or anything similar and is then basically punched repeatedly in a slow and controlled manner.
This repeated stress on the hands really helps to strengthen the ligaments and tendons while also strengthening the hands themselves.
After a while, you should notice your hands beginning to look bigger and feel much stronger.
Fingertip Push-ups
We all know that push-ups are one of the most effective exercises for working the chest and building strong pectoral muscles, but did you know that a few tweaks could get you bigger hands too?
If you take a simple chest exercise and tweak the form slightly to perform fingertip push-ups, you’ll quickly find that your hands will start to feel fatigued and will gradually look bigger and get much stronger.
Instead of getting into a conventional push-up position with your palms flat on the floor, instead, you should place your fingers on the floor for stability and use them to do the push-up. Stretch your fingers out as if they were a tripod and focus on really stabilizing your body and executing the perfect technique.
You should only do fingertip push-ups if you can safely and effectively perform a push-up.
Make sure you keep your fingers secured firmly in place as you don’t want to risk slipping or breaking them. Yes, that has happened in the past, and it certainly is not pleasant.
Knuckle Push-ups
Now we’re really getting into martial arts territory because up next we have knuckle push-ups.
Knuckle push-ups are often done by martial artists who want to strengthen their hands and their knuckles.
These are not to be taken lightly and if done incorrectly can cause a wide range of hand issues. If done right, though, they can provide a wealth of hand-related benefits.
With knuckle push-ups, the idea here is to get down into a standard push-up position, but to do the push-ups from your knuckles, rather than from your fingertips, or from the palms. We won’t tell you how to do a push-up because that would be patronizing.
Just be aware that you should only do knuckle push-ups if you are experienced with these types of exercises and with push-ups in general.
They are painful and can cause injury, especially in younger people or people with weaker hands.
Hand Expander Bands
No, these are not just some cheap gimmick designed to go viral on the internet, hand expander bands really do work.
These bands have been specially created to expand your hands and to make them bigger, stronger, and wider than they were prior.
They work the muscles, ligaments, and tendons found in the hands and wrists and help to strengthen and elongate them, thereby making them much larger than they were prior.
These bands are nothing fancy, they’re basically just simplified and smaller resistance bands that you use on your hands rather than the rest of your body as you do with resistance bands for building other muscles in the body.
These bands fit over the fingers and use resistance to stretch the fingers in opposite directions so that they work against each other to stretch the muscle tissues and fibres and build muscle in the hands.
Using them couldn’t be simpler as you simply hold your palms facing you, place all of your five fingers into the centre of the band and then open your fingers and expand the band as if you were trying to open your fingers as wide and as far as they will possibly stretch.
Perform 4 sets of 20 reps and then switch hands and do the exact same on the opposite hand. By the time you’ve finished, your hand will be on fire but you’ll soon be reaping the rewards. Gradually do more sets and reps, or pick a bigger resistance if you find the exercise too easy.
How To Measure The Size Of Your Hands
If you want to get bigger hands you first need to know just how big your hands really are, and whether or not the exercises you’re doing are actually working.
The good news is that measuring the size of your hands is not particularly tricky. All you need to do is take a measuring tape, wrap it, just underneath the knuckles (not of the thumb) of your dominant hand, and then make a fist. Read this measurement, take a note, and this is your hand width size.
The Importance Of Proper Nutrition
If you want to build bigger muscles, as well as exercising in the gym you should also eat plenty of healthy food and increase your protein intake. If you want to get bigger hands, you should apply this same principle.
In terms of how to get bigger hands, the basic idea is to build up the muscles, tendons, and ligaments in the hand, while also increasing bone density. All of this is done through exercise and a healthy diet.
Make sure you get plenty of lean protein each day, complex carbs and good fats for energy, and fruits and vegetables for added nutrients.
So, Can You Get Bigger Hands?
Yes, you can!
As you can see, it is very possible to get bigger hands through a combination of exercises, movements, and lifestyle changes.
This increase in hand size won’t come instantly, and it might be several months before you notice a real difference, but rest assured, if you follow the advice listed above, your hands will become bigger and stronger, just be patient.
