As a yute, my mom always told me about an old dairy farmer turned preacher who had “hands like a catcher’s mitt.”
She said, “His hand would swallow yours.”
You might think having big milker hands is a genetic thing, but more often than you can think, it’s not. Old dairy farmers who were of average height could have gargantuan hands.
The strange truth, though, is that the farmer’s hands got bigger without great muscular strain. They didn’t grab the cow’s teats and squeeze hard – but they did do thousands of somewhat light reps per day that not only built muscular endurance, but tendon strength as well.
A friend of mine, Jim, was raised on a dairy farm. He has big hands, but his father, who was about the same height, had hands that dwarfed his own.
When Jim grew up, he didn’t milk cows by hand as machines had already taken over – but his father milked 100 cows per day without any assistance – and he did it twice per day.
Training your hands vigorously has its place. It’s not only good for increasing overall body strength, it’s also good for your brain.
You can train your hands naturally, without high-tech gadgetry, by hanging from a pull-up bar or tree branch; from doing farmer’s carries with five-gallon buckets filled with water or sand; from using monkey bars or a peg board; from rope climbing; from doing fingertip pushups; from wadding up newspapers; and so on.
Thing is, you don’t “have to” do any of the above exercises – but the old-time dairy farmers “had to” get’er done – every day, no matter what. Instead of being told to “go pound salt,” it was their daily duty to “go milk the cows.”
Rest and recovery is a big part of increasing strength, speed, endurance, flexibility, and such. So this makes me think how much stronger those dairy farmers’ hands would be if they didn’t have to milk cows daily?
I guess we’ll never know.
Kick ass – take names!
Matt Furey
P.S. We’re getting mighty close to launching my new book, ENTER THE ZEN ZONE: The Natural Way to Get ALL Your Goals. It’s going to be MAMMOTH. And EPIC!
