Everyone has different genetics. Some people are tall, some people are short. Some people can gain muscle quickly and I know that some guys just can’t get rid of their belly fat.
And some of us have really small hands.
There are also many professional and amateur boxers who just want to have bigger hands so their opponents can feel the impact more. After all, competition boxing glove’s size depends on your class (heavyweight, lightweight etc.) and not the hand’s size. So if you have bigger hands, you can actually have more advantage.
Or maybe you just don’t want to have small hands.
I don’t know your reason why you want to have bigger hands, however, there are some really effective and proven ways to achieve it and below you can find them.
1. Hand Exercises
There are numerous hand exercises like making a fist, finger stretch, finger lift… According to WebMD, all of these work and considering that you do these 3 to 5 times per week, you can improve your hand size. However, I know that many of you want results faster and I get it. If you fall in this category, the most effective way is to train with a good hand grip strengthener. Hand grip strengtheners are designed to provide more fiber activation thus it just works better than many other hand exercises.
See: Reviews of Best Hand Grip Strengtheners
2. Lift!
Hit the gym. Do squats, Olympic lifts, incline bench press… According to Wolff’s Law when you increase the load on your wrist and hand, these will have more size.
3. Work on Your Wrist!
There are also studies like Wolf’s show that bigger wrists also help you have bigger hands. There are various exercises which can be done with equipment like dumbbells, resistance bands. However always remember that you train your wrists so always use very small weights!
4. Improve your grip
This one does not directly increase your hand’s size however when you have a stronger grip you can actually do more difficult hand exercises and even lift more! And this translates to gaining more hand muscles.
I know that many people, who read this article, are martial artists and this can also come in handy for you as well.
5. Push up planks
Isometrics like push up planks are one of the most preferred exercises for building hand muscles. I know that instructors, who work in Thai MMA gyms, suggest this exercise to their students.
Your hand bones can have more density and you can have denser hand muscles with it. I know that it can be really difficult at first however when you start doing it, you can do it with longer rest periods and you can gradually decrease this period.
If you are interested in doing this exercise, check out the video below. If you do it wrong, you can have sprains or irritations. Shortly, there can be many consequences and the video below shows how to do this exercise correctly and also shows common mistakes as well so you can avoid them.
6. Plyometrics
Some plyometrics also improve your grip significantly and your hands can have more muscle mass with them. Actually, this is one of the most effective ways to build hypothenar (hand, the medial side of palm) muscles. Even though there is other “less popular” plyometrics for this the most popular and convenient one is battle rope training for hands.
You can see this training tool anywhere (gyms, parks…). Also if you have anchors and suitable mats, you can even train with it in your own home!
If you are interested, you can check out these top-notch battle ropes.
7. Consume More Calories!
Alright, while you are doing these exercises, methods, plyometric exercises above you want to be in a calorie surplus and you need to consume enough protein so you can gain muscle. Also when you have a good diet, you can also have more bone density. In this way, you can add small amounts of muscle mass to your intermediate and hypothenar muscles. And there are quite good bodybuilding websites which talk everything about bulking diets and if you follow them, I am sure that you will gain muscle.
Some Important Notes
As you can guess, there are also many MMA fighters who can use bigger hands to their advantage. After all only one MMA glove size is allowed in the Octagon. However, keep in mind that this depends on the fighter. Because it affects many things including your BJJ performance (grip, submission etc.) as well. Obviously, you can’t expect to do all BJJ techniques for MMA (no gi) effectively with bigger hands, fingers etc. can you?
So considering that always consult with your trainer before you implement any of these methods because it can affect your martial arts training performance badly.
Conclusive Thoughts
One thing is to note that you won’t see a drastic difference in your hands. Since genetics (your bone structure…) specify your hand size and how much you can increase your hand size. Also even if you do everything right, you may not even see a difference for weeks and even months!
However, if you put in a consistent effort for a long time, you will see results. Many people on forums and in (MMA, Boxing) gyms actually saw results with these and some of them were actually proven with Dexa scan and various muscle measurement tools. The methods above will definitely help you. You just need to be consistent with them.
Even though we use our hands for basically everything we don’t particularly train them. Just like any other muscle groups if you don’t train them regularly these will get smaller over time. So even after you get bigger hands you need to do some of these exercises consistently so your hands can maintain the size.
I hope that this writing is informative for you and if you have any experiences with the methods above or want to share anything, just leave your comments in the comment section.
I guess extra muscle generated by the exercises you outlined will beef up the hands. After some years of martial arts training, the knuckles of my hands became tougher and larger, particularly if no hand protection was used. In boxing, knuckle conditioning isn’t that important, so I guess hand size is an issue. The bigger the fist, the bigger the wallop!
Exactly, these exercises can make a slight difference. After doing regular MMA sessions, I also had a similar experience. Actually, knuckle condition is also important in boxing too but I will talk about this in the next post. So follow my site lol : )
Also as you said, it is one of the factors which increase the punching power.