Mixed grip: How it is done and when it is used

Stop to think for a moment: how do you hold the bar in an exercise that requires you to put on a lot of weight like the deadlift? How do you place your hands and how do you place your fingers? Do you think that you are benefiting from the grip you use?

Although most of the time when doing dead weight ( in any of its variants) is usually used a prone grip or double prone grip, when we lift a very high weight (normal to make dead weight) we have a good ally in the mixed grip. We explain how it is done and what is the purpose of the mixed grip.

As we said, as a general rule the type of grip that is usually used in deadlifts is the prone grip or double prone grip : with the palms of the hands facing towards us, and the thumb surrounding the bar. This type of grip, as long as the thumb surrounds the bar, is quite safe and we can use it if we are not pulling as much weight as we can in this exercise.

To move large weights in a safe way is very interesting the mixed grip, a combination of the prone grip and the supine grip in which one of our hands (it is indifferent which of the two) is placed with the palm facing towards us, and the other with the palm facing outwards.

This type of grip is much safer than the previous one since the hands catch the bar and prevent it from sliding towards the ground (by using too much weight, for example). Despite this advantage, it also has some “but”: when using the mixed grip we do not have a balanced position (something that we can solve by changing the arm that looks out in each series) and the biceps of the supinated arm in that position is at risk of breakage (so it is important to turn only the forearm, and not the entire arm from the shoulder).

We can use the double prone grip in the series in which we do not load much weight, such as the high repetitions or the approximation series, and reserve the mixed grip for those series in which we are going to lift a maximum or very high weight.

What kind of grip do you use?