Mastery of Hand Strength

I discovered the author via a number of entertaining videos on Youtube, and with 22 mainly 4 or 5 star reviews I thought this book would be the perfect book on grip strength training. I purchased this book at the same time as two others, and having now read and digested them all, here are my opinions...The positives:1 - The book is written in a friendly, easy to read style2 - There is a hello of a lot of excellent information and training tips packed inside3 - Great anecdotes and tales of grip strength masters4 - Useful photosThe negatives:1 - It is VERY expensive for a Kindle book - I was expecting it to be a lot longer than 100 odd pages2 - The Kindle formatting isn't great - there are a number of paragraphs jarringly formatted to the right, for no reason I can see, and numerous missing capital letters3 - There are a lot of product placements4 - Most of the photos would benefit from being largerThe second title I bought was the hilarously outdated Edward Aston's  How to Develop a Powerful Grip  - must have been great in the 1930s, but mostly outdated now. Plus it's freely available to download from Google as it's out of copyright now.The final title I purchased was Dale Travis-Amber's  Ultimate Grip Strength System: Easy to Follow Hand, Wrist and Forearm Strength Training Exercises to Build a Crushing Handshake and a Strong Grip in Weeks (How To Get Fit Free)  for 99c on special offer, and was also very good, and is aimed more at the average guy who was just getting into grip training (so was more suited to me).So overall? John Brookfield's  Mastery of Hand Strength  is definitely aimed at the seasoned grip enthusiast - who has a bigger budget! I would rate it as 3.5 stars, but as I can't use 1/2 measures, I've been kind and given it 4 stars. The majority of my negatives could easily be corrected, and if that were to happen, it would deserve a 5 star rating.

I had a hard time with this... there is some stuff in here that I just couldn't wrap my head around from a training standpoint. It struck me as a little hokey.I'm not saying it isn't or couldn't be effective and great. I'm just saying it wasn't for me.I know that this is somewhat of an "industry standard" so I'm going to return to it and do my best to give it a fair shake.

Nicely put together. Worth it if you are serious about improving your grip. This gave me a lot of great ideas on how to build a routine.

This is the most comprehensive book about hand strength I have ever read and i've only ever read one. I know i won't need another book for the rest of my life. Trained using just a few techniques for a few weeks and I have to recalibrate my handshakes, massages, and squeezes. People have been complaining.

I read this book and even made some contraptions which indeed increased my hand strength!I need to re-read it, cause it's like this... When you read it, your motivated all over again.The author is a cool dude. Old school down to earth guy, straight to the point and funny too.. I laughed out loud many times reading the book. This book will motivate you to have the grip of a gorilla crushing anything your hands can grasp.I made some block weights with a 30lb dumbbell and a hack saw and the final product is great.Also made a grip strengthener, with a Softball, drilled a hole in it, took a S-hook screw, hand screwed it in tight, hooked a small chain to it, and ran the chain through a 10 lb weight plate. Very simple, and you hold it till your hand can't grip it anymore.There's more but you have to read it yourself..All in all, 5 stars for sure! Awesome book.

If you want to know a lot of exercises and a little theory about forearms workouts this is probably the only book you'll need.John Brookfield believes there are essentially 5 muscle groups that must be trained seperately: finger flexors, finger extensors, thumb, forearm and reverse forearm. Those are my words, not his and my assessment. He does not spell it out so clearly, but he does include some nice charts to demonstrate which exercises work which muscle group.He has great insight that no one else has, for example dynamic gripping improves gripping ability while moving. This translates to sports better than simply gripping while standing.

This is the second version of this title I've read. The first was over ten years ago, and was a physical copy. It's been a while since I've read that one, but this one seems even better. He (John Brookfield) is definitely a master of grip, and forearm strength. Not really a book for closing heavy grippers, though he's included some updated info on that subject as well. Highly recommend for those looking for COMPLETE lower arm srrength!

I bought this book a couple years ago when I was really into developing hand strength to improve my throwing and shooting abilities in lacrosse. The book has a lot of interesting (and potentially useful) ideas for building hand and forearm strength, however, a lot of them utilize do-it-yourself/make-it-yourself machines or weight systems, which I didn't and still don't have time or space to construct. The book does suggest some more conventional methods for improving hand strength (e.g. hand grippers, specific weight exercises, etc.).

This book is the real deal written by someone that backs their claims in the Guinness book of records. Forget about chrome islands and learn how to train like a man!

good information but i think the descriptions and photos could have been better. other than that i'm glad i bought it.

full of useful ideas

It changed the way I see training. I'm definitely gonna become much stronger! The excercices are just great, very useful and the advice given by John is just top class. Ex: to be able to listen to your body and have enough discipline not to overtrain

The book is professional, informative, and well written. The author certainly knows of which he speaks, and he does a first rate job imparting this knowledge, won through personal experience, to the reader.I strongly recommend "Mastery of Hand Strength" - by John Brookfield. You will not be disappointed.