Kinney’s Secret Weapon

Secret Weapon

I don’t remember beeing so excited about any piece of training equipment for a long time. I got the Secret Weapon made by a friend. In comparison to Joe Kinney’s original design of this brutal machine that simulates a gripper and that is intended for doing severe negatives only, there’s a few alterations on mine. First of all, the handles are slightly thinner on purpose. I will experiment with this feature to see how it works, if it proves to be a bad idea and to work against my plan I’ll just wrap some tape around the handles. The difference in thickness isn’t that big but it is noticeable once you grap the handles. This allows for a tighter close, even tighter than if the top handle was just filed. Well, the top handle is not much filed on mine yet because of the thinner handles, but I will file it down. I just need to be careful with that as I might easily take too much of, so I plan to do it gradually with a hand file to be able to experiment properly. The ratio on mine is also harder opposed to the plans I got, as I had the loop for the weight pin welded about 4″ further away from the pivot point. But that doesn’t mean anything other than the comparisons between the people using SW as well can’t be made. But it’s not the purpose of this piece of training equipment. It’s a weapon of forearm destruction built for the sole purpose of making it’s master stronger and become able to close the CoC #4! 😉 I have been using extended handle grippers for the tough negatives so far in my current training program, but now I will ditch them and work on this machine instead.

I did my first workout with this last friday. I started out light, experimenting with the weight I could and should be using. As I got warmed up, I went up on weight to 45 kg (around 90 lbs). Maybe I could have used more but this load pealed my hands open fairly quick, which is the purpose. I had it written in my workout schedule that I was supposed to do 16 severe negs with this. Well, eager as I was I lost count somewhere around 20. I guess I did well over 20 negs with each hand. The feel you get with this machine is incredible, I haven’t experienced a feel like that no matter how hard grippers I have used for the negatives. Constant load through the full ROM does make a huge difference. I would describe the feel so that it rips the deepest layer muscles apart, totally wrecks them with each rep. BUT the major surprise to me was that despite the horrible pain from doing even a single rep with enough weight, you can just keep on pounding away with it and get huge volumes of quality work done. That is just great. You don’t waste any energy whatsoever during the concentric phase, as you just cheat it closed with the other hand and this doesn’t tax any gripping muscles, unlike cheating the extended handle grippers closed, which becomes a task in itself after some reps. One great thing about this machine is that I can say goodbye to the bad palm tears I had when I was doing the ext. handle negs.

Once again, I’m really excited about this addition to my training equipment arsenal and expect to get great results from training hard with this. It might prove to be just the ticket for pushing me forward again and take me to my ultimate goal. My plan will of course be to work as hard as I can on this machine as well, it’s exciting to see how it all goes.