The Little Grip Trainer That Rides in My Coat Pocket

The carrots were the last straw. I had a good row of them going in the garden behind the house, and I grabbed the top of one and pulled, and my hand just let go. Not the arm. The hand. The fingers opened on their own and the carrot stayed in the ground.

I stood there a minute looking at my own hand like it belonged to somebody else. I am 68. I carried mail on a rural route outside Wilkes-Barre for 31 years, up and down porch steps in every kind of weather, and my hands had never quit on me before.

That same week I could not get the lid off a jar of pickles. Joan was at the table. I handed it to her without a word, which is its own kind of confession. She had it open in four seconds.

I had been exercising four years by then, so it was not laziness. Bands, a seated elliptical, balance work, ankle weights. None of it touched my hands, and hands are in every part of a garden. That is when I ordered the Pnrskter grip set.

The Pnrskter set came as three hand grippers and three finger stretchers, six resistance levels running from 6.6 pounds up to 50 pounds, silicone, and 3.2 ounces for the whole set. I started on the lightest gripper, because that is the only sensible place to start.

I did not buy it expecting much. I have a drawer full of things I bought expecting not much. This one had a quality I appreciated, though: nothing to charge, nothing to plug in, and no instructions to read twice.

My doctor is the one who got me exercising in the first place, and his standing instruction has always been to check with him or a physical therapist before starting anything new, particularly with a joint that gives me trouble. Mine is the right knee. I mentioned the grippers at my next visit and he had no objection.

Pulling a beet out of wet ground takes more grip than any jar lid I own, and by August I was doing it without thinking about my hand at all.

Here is how it actually fits into my day. I do not have a program. I have a recliner, the evening news, and a gripper sitting in the cup holder. I squeeze ten or twelve times with each hand during a commercial, set it down, and pick it up again later. Some nights that happens three times. Some nights once. It was never about getting strong in an evening.

The finger stretchers were slower to grow on me. You put them on your fingers and open your hand against the resistance, which is the opposite of everything else I do. Joan took those over almost immediately. She says her hands are less stiff in the morning, and she is not one to hand out compliments to exercise equipment.

One gripper from the Pnrskter set lives in the truck. When I am parked waiting on Joan, I do a set. That sounds like nothing, and it is nothing, but it adds up to a few hundred extra squeezes a week that I would otherwise have spent watching a door.

One thing I did not expect was that the set turned into a small shared thing. Joan keeps a stretcher on the end table by her chair. Our daughter Karen is a nurse two hours away and she is the one who nudged me into exercising in the first place, and when she visited she picked up a gripper and worked her way up the resistances without any trouble at all, which was humbling.

What changed, in plain terms. I pulled the rest of the carrots that August without stopping to shake my hand out. I opened the next jar myself. I carry feed bags from the truck to the shed one in each hand again instead of making two trips, and I have stopped thinking about the porch rail, though I still put a hand on it when the steps are wet.

The garden is the reason I do any of this. Potatoes, carrots, beets, and more squash than two people can eat. Kneeling, lifting, carrying and gripping, in that order of how much attention people pay to them. Only one of those four gets ignored, and it is the one that decides whether the potato comes up.

What did not change. My hands are still stiff first thing in the morning until I move them. The 50 pound gripper is still beyond me and I have made my peace with that. And the grippers did nothing for my knee, my back or my wind, which is what the elliptical and the bands are for. It is one small piece of a routine that has several pieces.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you are where I was, here is what I would tell you. Start with your hands before they give out, not after. You do not need a machine for it. A set like the Pnrskter fits in a coat pocket, weighs next to nothing, and you can use it sitting down in front of the television. Start on the lightest gripper and stay there longer than feels necessary. And do the thing I did, which is to raise it with your doctor or a physical therapist first, especially if you have arthritis, a repaired tendon, or a hand that has been hurting. If I had asked four years ago, I would have saved myself a carrot.