About GST

Below is a guest post that Diesel Crew was nice enough to post on their site to act as the official launch of our site. I’m repeating it here just in case you didn’t read that post and are wondering what in the hell we created this site for.

How Twitter Will Unite the Grip Strength Community

Grip strength training can be a lonely endeavor. Unlike team sports, usually a grip strength practitioner undertakes his obsession by himself in a dusty basement surrounded by storage boxes, or in a small portion of the garage that’s just big enough to house a garage gym. When he beats a personal record, the radio and perhaps a pet are the only things around to share in his excitement. When he hears terms like hub lifts, pinch grip, CoC #4, or sledgehammer leveraging, he understands perfectly. When he tries to explain these terms to his friends and family, they rarely understand (or want to for that matter).

So, he does the only thing he can; search for a sense of community with other grip strength enthusiasts, and online is the best place to go.

Luckily for him, there have been several key players that have stepped in to fill the void.

The Grip Board is an outstanding resource for people wanting to learn, discuss, and share everything grip. From FAQs to training routines, a gripper will find the information he needs there.

IronMind Enterprises creates many top-notch training devices for grip strength folks. They have standardized grip strength training with their products and certifications, without which no community can grow. It would be hard to imagine how people would train or accurately measure their grip strength without IronMind.

Diesel Crew expands on every aspect of grip training. They create specialized information products, and use their marketing, copyrighting, and video production skills to push grip strength training into a wider audience through ebooks, youtube videos, and participation in social networks.

These sites and many others have done wonders for our community. Yet, the Internet is moving away from traditional websites and forums and into social media—primarily Twitter—and the grip strength community as a whole will inevitably have to do the same. It’s where the action and intimacy that we crave is. Yes, some people in the community are slow to adopt Twitter, but that will change, and change fast.

When it does, though, we’ll be faced with the same problem as before unfortunately. What other grip strength folks use twitter? How can I find them? What are they doing? What’s new in their training? Why do I feel isolated once again?

Sure, Twitter tries to assist people in finding others with similar interests. But, I used twitter for months before I learned that twitter had a search site at search.twitter.com that allowed people to search for topics, twitter names, and a persons’ own twitter name. It took me several more months to learn that people used special searches using a hashtag (#) to assist people with their searching efforts. For example, people wanting to find out information about the nationwide tea parties used the #tcot in their tweets. Everyone adopted the search term and could therefore search for this specific phrase and see what everyone within that community was talking about.

So, although twitter does help people meet up, I feel there’s a need to go a step further to unite our grip strength community.

Why can’t there just be one place where people can go to see all the tweets about grip strength training? Why can’t this place standardize the way people tweet to assist the community in finding each other better?

These seemed like reasonable questions for me to ask, but unfortunately, nothing like this existed.

I decided to change that.

I created a website that captures and displays grip strength tweets all in one place using standardized search phrases. The goal of the site is to get every single grip strength fan on the planet to stop by for a visit, meet and interact with everyone else in the community. There’s absolutely no reason why every single grip strength fan on the planet shouldn’t be able to tweet with every other grip strength fan on the planet. The goal of the site is to allow this to happen.

I hope to have all grippers out there sign our guest book and leave their information (and twitter handle), so that our community can unite online, and we can finally see how many of us are out there.

I know I’m curious. Aren’t you? Visit http://gripstrengthtweets.com and let’s get this sucker started! And don’t forget to join twitter and follow GST at http://twitter.com/gripstrengthtwt.

END

So, now you know what we’re all about. All you have to do is join twitter and start using the search terms below to get your tweets into our site:

• #gripstrength or #handstrength for general grip discussion tweets
• #pinchgrip for pinch grip tweets
• #steelbending for steel bending tweets
• #cardtearing or #pbtearing for tearing tweets
• #hammerlever for hammer leveraging tweets
• #hubgrip for hub grip tweets
• #handgrippers for hand gripper tweets
• #kettlebells for kettle bell tweets
• #sandbags for sand bag training
• #wristroller or #gripextensors for wrist/extensor tweets
• #ironmind for IronMind Enterprises tweets
• #dieselcrew for Diesel Crew tweets
• #torqueathletic for Torque Athletic tweets
• #gripboard for The Grip Board tweets
• #adamtglass for Adam T Glass tweets
• #fbbcgrip for Fat Bastard Barbell Co. tweets
• #johnbrookfield for John Brookfield tweets
• #strongergrip for Stronger Grip Enterprises tweets
• #davidhorne for David Horne tweets
• #johnwood for John Wood FHS tweets

Print the above terms out so you’ll have them handy when you tweet about grip strength.

For fun, test one of the terms out in twitter and then come back and look for your tweet. The page refreshed every 10 seconds so your tweet should show up.

That’s it grippers! You know what we’re about and what to do. Go out there and interact and let everyone else know we’re here to help.

Grip On!

Shane

PS. Note to Sponsors:

If you have a grip strength related website/company and want to get your ad on our site, contact us to get the ball rolling. We’re not out to make a ton of money here, so $100 will get you an ad on our site for the life of the site. Can’t be any easier (and cheaper) than that. Besides, your company ad will look a lot better than the current placeholders that are on our site now.

UPDATE:

On second thought, I’m NOT going to charge sponsors. In an attempt to bring the grip/strength community together, I’ll wave the fee and invite anybody that wants to put their ad on our site for free. Contact us now.