Weight Training Acessories | Weightlifting Belts, Wrist Straps, and Chalk

Weight Training Advice

Weight Training Accessories

Whether you weight train at home or at the gym, there are a few items you should always take with you to help enhance your workouts. These weight training accessories are a weightlifting belt, training gloves, wrist straps, and chalk. While you don't absolutely have to have all of these items to get bigger and stronger from training with weights, they will help you lift more weight on certain exercises and help prevent injuries.

A weightlifting belt is the most important weight training accessory you should have. A good weightlifting belt should be very wide in the middle of it to help support your lower back while working out. When you're performing heavy squats and deadlifts you need to make sure your lower back is supported even if you're using good form to decrease any chance of injury. The lower back muscles are the easiest muscles to injure and you're entire weight training routine will be affected negatively if you hurt them. If you want you can do warm up sets of the squat and deadlift without a weightlifting belt as long as you don't break form. It's not necessary to wear a weight training belt during every exercise, just the major compound ones that involve the lower back when you're lifting heavy.

On many back exercises, such as pull-ups or pulldowns, rows, and deadlifts, your grip tends to give out before the muscles you are training. Wrist straps and chalk are 2 great weight training accessories to help assist your grip on the exercises. Wrist straps are best used on pulldowns, pull-ups, and rows and you won't make a mess using them like you will with chalk. However, there is one exercise that you should use chalk on the palms of your hands instead of wrist straps - the deadlift. While deadlifting with wrist straps you are forced to hold the weight no matter what, which can lead to a pulled forearm muscle if you're training with heavy weight. Chalk is better for deadlifting since the weight isn't strapped to your wrists and won't be pulling on your forearms and wrists if your grip starts giving out. You'll also notice that powerlifters always use chalk to deadlift as they aren't allowed to use wrist straps in competition.

Weight training gloves are a good accessory to have if you get callouses on the palms of your hands. These gloves will protect your hands from painful callouses, which may affect your grip even while training with light weights. They'll also be helpful if you tend to have sweaty palms and don't want to chalk up before every exercise.

2 other weight training accessories you'll see people using at the gym from time to time are knee wraps and bench shirts.Both are primarily used by powerlifters training for competition. Knee wraps should be used if you're performing squats with very heavy weight and only 1-5 reps. They do tend to give you false sense of security sometimes though, as they may mask knee pain which could ultimately get worse if you train too heavy. You shouldn't use knee wraps for higher rep squats either because your lower legs could become numb from lack of blood flow due to the wraps being wrapped tightly around the knees. Don't use them while warming up to your heaviest weights either. Bench shirts aren't really needed unless you're training for a powerlifting competition and want to test your bench press max as most competitions allow you to use them. They will allow you to bench heavier weights, but are very inconvenient as you can't put them on without help.