Lifting Straps in India — When Grip Stops Being the Limit

There is a specific moment lifting straps are built for: your grip gives out while your back still has reps left. If your deadlift sets are ending because the bar is rolling out of your fingers rather than because your posterior chain is done, you are training your forearms and short-changing everything else. Straps fix that one problem, precisely.

NBD lifting straps are manufactured in-house and built for lifters who pull heavy — deadlifts, rows, shrugs, rack pulls and high-volume back work.

Straps or Hook Grips — Which Do You Need?

• Lifting straps — fabric wound around the bar and gripped over. You still close your hand, so you keep a real feel for the bar. The default choice, and the one most lifters should start with.
• Power hook grips — the load sits on a steel hook instead of your fingers. More support than any strap, less feel for the bar, and genuinely useful if you are training around a hand, thumb or forearm injury.

Which Strap Shape?

NBD straps come in three, and the shape changes how they behave more than people expect.

• Straight — the most popular and the easiest to learn. Wrap the tail around the bar, grip over it, go. Quick to bail out of, which is what you want on heavy pulls.
• Infinity 8 — a closed figure-eight loop that locks the hand to the bar hardest. Slowest to get out of, which is exactly why it suits heavy shrugs, holds and static work rather than a maximal deadlift.
• Collar — a closed loop that seats around the wrist. Fast to set up and comfortable across repeated sets.

All three carry the white rubber covering that keeps the strap rigid on the bar instead of slipping as the set goes on, and every pair is left and right.

How to Use Them

Thread the tail through the loop and seat the strap on your wrist. Pass the tail under and around the bar, winding it toward you, then roll the bar back to take up the slack before you grip over the top. The tighter that wind, the less the bar can rotate.

Set both hands before you pull, not one at a time on the way up. And take them off between sets — a strap left cinched on the wrist through a whole session is just restricting circulation for no benefit.

The Honest Bit About Grip

Grip is trainable, and it only trains when you make it work. A lifter who straps every pulling set from their first month builds a back their hands cannot hold onto, and that gap shows up the day they pull raw or step on a platform.

The pattern that works: pull raw for as long as grip holds, then strap the volume work and the heaviest sets where grip would otherwise cut the set short. Straps remove grip as a limiter on back training. They are not a way to skip having a grip.

Straps and Competition

Worth knowing before you buy: lifting straps are a training tool, not a competition one. The IPF Technical Rulebook sets out permitted personal equipment in detail — belts, wrist wraps and knee sleeves each with exact dimensional limits — and lifting straps do not appear on that list. Every competition deadlift is pulled with your own hands. Check your own federation's current rulebook before meet day.

Making Them Last

Straps fail at the stitching where the loop is formed, and that is accelerated by being stored damp. Air dry them after sweaty sessions rather than leaving them balled at the bottom of a gym bag, and check the loop stitching every few months on a pair you pull heavy with.

Straps handle grip. A belt handles bracing.

Straps take grip out of the equation on pulls. They do nothing for trunk stability — that is what a lever belt does, and on a heavy deadlift the two solve different halves of the same problem. If you only pull moderate loads, you need neither yet.

Read next: Wrist wraps vs lifting straps — which one you actually need

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