Weightlifting straps are gym accessories that certainly have a part to play in most people’s gym workouts at one time or another. They can be a fantastic training aid if used correctly, but they can also slow you down in certain ways if not used correctly.

Let me explain. The reason you may need to use lifting straps is because your forearms are not capable of maintaining a strong enough grip to allow you to perform the desired number of repetitions of a given exercise.

So, taking wide-grip pull-ups as an example, you can’t do enough reps to fatigue your back muscles before your forearms let you down. In this case, to break down enough muscle tissue doing wide-grip pull-ups, you would need to use weightlifting straps to do the work that your forearms are unable to do.

This can be a great help for the larger muscle groups when performing heavy pulling or lifting movements, but it does not solve the problem of weak forearm muscles. In fact, going this route and always using straps to do forearm work will ultimately lead to true muscle imbalances and potentially weak forearms.

The forearms will not have the opportunity to develop the power and connective tissue strength that they would have gained if they had been worked without using straps and remember the old saying ‘if you don’t use it, you lose it’…they could even become weak!

That said, it’s important to work all muscles as hard as you can, ideally to muscle failure, but if a muscle group won’t let you do it because it’s the weak link, then avoid that by using a training aid. it makes good sense.

However, your forearms will still be very weak and you will have to try to build strength in that area separately. This is easy to do using exercises like forearm curls, hammer curls, and reverse wrist extension movements. All of this will help improve the strength and power of the forearm muscles if done regularly and with increasingly heavier weights.

If you follow the principle of progression with your forearms, they too will build strength over time and then you can start attempting the heavier lifting and pulling movements without using weightlifting straps and simply relying on grip strength alone.