Rice bucket training: Does it work?

Rice bucket training, where did it come from? Was it an ancient Chinese way to train for grip strength or a way for major league baseball players to throw harder?

While I couldn’t find substantial evidence to back this claim, greatapegrips.com states rice bucket training began in ancient China. They quote that it stems from the idea that Shaolin Monks used the method for martial arts training to improve their grip strength. Maybe so!

Regardless, rice bucket training has been around for a while. It’s helped athletes improve their hand strength, dexterity, coordination, and their tendon and ligament health. It’s especially helped rock climbers!

How rice bucket training works

Rice bucket training works through simple resistance exercises. It seems silly that sticking your hand in a bucket of rice and moving it around can yield results, right?

With structure and consistency, you can improve your grip strength and hand muscles with simple exercises.

Rice bucket training targets the muscle groups in your hands and forearms and can act as a flexor and extensor workout in one. The big benefit of this type of training is the ability to target those extensor muscles.

As climbers, we use our flexors all the time. However, we must remember that opposing muscles, the extensors, help our flexors stay strong. Keeping the hand muscles healthy and strong is important to avoid imbalances and improve overall strength.

Key benefits of rice bucket training

Playing around with rice for a few minutes each week will improve your hand and forearm strength. Okay, it’s a little more intense than that, but you get the idea. You’ll also improve your wrist flexibility and mobility; it’s a recipe for staying healthy.

Strengthening your muscles to help you climb better isn’t the only reason to start rice bucket training. A key benefit is how it can help you stay injury-free.

Improved dexterity in your wrists and hands will help you stay healthy when performing repeated climbing movements or moves with weird wrist contortion required.

High underclings are hard!

How to get started with rice bucket training

You’ll need two things to do rice bucket training.

1. Rice
2. A Bucket

That’s it! It’s a relatively inexpensive form of grip and forearm training. You don’t necessarily need a bucket, either. Anything you can fit your hands into will work. A cooler, large bowl, etc., will work just fine.

The type of rice isn’t important either. Grab the cheapest thing you can find since you plan to play around with it between your hands.

Remember, although you’re sitting down and moving your hands in rice, you still need to warm up before your workout. Do light hand movements in your rice before starting your workout to get your blood pumping and your muscles warmed up.

Rice bucket training exercises

Szatstrength on YouTube has an excellent video showing how to do some of the workouts below.

If you’d like visual aids, follow this link when you start training: 

To start with rice bucket training, aim to perform 4-6 exercises in this list.

Start with 2-3 sets for 30 seconds each. As you improve, or if you already have strong hands from climbing, aim to do 3-5 sets, performing each exercise for a minute.

1. Squeeze – Dive your hands into the rice repeatedly and squeeze the rice through your hands.
2. Expanders – Bring your fingertips together and plunge your hand into the rice. Open your hand and focus on extending your fingers all the way. Then remove it and repeat!
3. Swirlers right – Submerge your fists in the rice and swirl your wrists clockwise in a circular motion. Keep your forearms still and only move your wrists.
4. Swirlers left – The same thing, but swirl your wrist counterclockwise.
5. Paint the fence – Keep your fists in the rice and move them up and down like you’re painting a fence. Try to keep your forearms still and focus on only moving your hands.
6. Side to side – This is the same as above, but move your hands left to right instead.

Rice bucket training vs traditional strength training

Rice bucket training is more than simple grip strength training. You can improve your grip strength with rice bucket training, but you may find better results when using traditional strength training.

Rice bucket training is better for improving hand strength overall. From tendons and ligaments to flexors and extenders, rice bucket training targets each aspect of the hand.

Traditional strength training focuses more on grip strength rather than hand dexterity.

Who can benefit from rice bucket training?

Rice bucket training can benefit anybody who wants stronger and more dexterous hands. Consider that this type of training won’t get you the strongest hands out there and shouldn’t be used if pure strength is your goal. However, it’s suitable for most climbers’ goals.

Rice bucket training is great if you’re more focused on improving the dexterity of your hand muscles or rehabbing from an injury to your finger, wrist, hand, or forearm.

This type of training helped me get back to climbing after I had surgery on a torn ligament in my thumb.

These workouts are more strenuous than they may sound.

How often should you do rice bucket training?

Rice bucket training can be done two to three times a week, along with your normal workout or climbing schedule. Remember that you’ll be sore from training, so don’t get discouraged if your climbing dips while recovering from a workout!

The best way to use rice bucket training is by incorporating it with other workouts. Sure, you can only train your forearm and grip strength, but that will only do so much if you don’t train the rest of your body.

If you aim to climb harder, you should create a training plan incorporating more than hand strength training.

What to expect from rice bucket training

If you’ve never trained your hand and grip strength, you’ll notice results within the first few months. Improved strength will be the first thing you notice, followed by increased size after a while of strengthening.

You can track your progress by feeling or using a grip strength test machine. If your thirty-second reps feel too easy, it’s time to increase your duration to a minute.

A grip strength test will accurately tell you if you’ve improved your grip strength.

Remember, rice bucket training will improve more than just grip strength, which may be harder to calculate.

Is rice bucket training worth it?

Rice bucket training improves hand and grip strength, but is that all you’re looking to do? If your goal is to improve your grip strength, I recommend performing other grip-strengthening exercises.

However, if you want healthier and more well-rounded hands, rice bucket training is a great routine. It strengthens your extensors and increases the dexterity of your hands and wrists.

I think you should train with a rice bucket if you want to improve your hand strength, but it shouldn’t be your only tool for increasing grip strength. There are more effective ways to improve your grip strength than digging your hands in a bucket of rice.

Have you used rice bucket training before? Did it help your climbing?

Let us know in the comments below.

I’m always happy to hear other people’s stories!

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