Closing Grippers and General Observations on Hand Strength:

Here's that blurb/article I've been putting off writing forever.


First off, you shouldn't mess with grippers as a newbie. Grippers are a fairly specific type of training that should be held off on until you have good base hand strength. Get yourself a sledge, pinch block, rolling thunder or other revolving handle like the FBBC Crusher and some plates.
Wrist strength is very important! It's like the transmission in a truck. What would happen if you put a Geo Metro tranny in a F-350? You'd gas it and then be fucked. Same thing with hand strength. Use the sledge to work your wrists hard. Things like front levers, rear levers and levers to the nose are good. I like to do front levers with my forearm laying on something flat and then dropping the hammer until it's paralell with my forearm and then lever it back up. If you can't do it with the hammer you have, just choke up on the handle and work your way up over time. Progression is a wonderful thing! I've noticed big crossover gains to other grip exercises from doing this variation. High reps have worked well for me, but you may vary.
For a pinch block I use 2 2x4's nailed together with a eyehook screwed in which hooks onto the hole in the top of my loading pin. Once again, high reps like 12+ work well for me (Lift, take hand off, immediately lift again). Use gloves if it messes up your skin. For a progression scheme, start with what you can get for 12-15, add 5 or 10lbs wait until you can get 12-15 again, then repeat.
The Rolling Thunder will work the "meat and potatoes" of your grip so to speak- the sweep. The workout is the same as the pinch block one. Use whatever you can get for what you can get for 12-15, add 5 or 10lbs wait until you can get 12-15 again, then repeat. You can use 2 sets or one, I never really noticed a big difference so I went with the one that took less time. This will be the main strength builder of the routine. To take a SWAG you should be ready to add in other exercises like grippers and bending when you've been doing this a few months. (As a footnote, if you are interested in overhand bending, grease the groove 4-5 days a week with chest crushes on a fairly difficult gripper)

When you are comfortable that you have advanced enough, feel free to add grippers or other things in and decrease the volume on the RT a little (as in workouts per week). For me lately something like this has been working well

-Light warmup with easy grippers
-Workset of 5-10 reps as wide as handsize allows(I use a credit card for consistency). Be sure to crush hard on every rep
-Singles with a gripper that is fairly tough using a paralell set, with the last being an overcrush held long as possible.
-Wrist work

The singles at the end are somewhat like doing some lockout work at the end of a bench or overhead workout. That last little bit doesn't get worked quite as hard as your sweep would with the wide reps so throw some singles with something fairly tough in to balance everything out. Be sure to do plenty of extensor work with bands or something similar! It will go a long way towards injury prevention. If you are dead set on closing a gripper with a parallel set, something like this would probably be more in order but I wouldn't reccomend using it for longer than a month or two at a time. Make sure to work the ever living hell out of your extensors while doing this! It is even more important on this because im my experience doing just parallel work will take it's toll on your knuckles/wrists. It's taken 5-6 MONTHS for my knuckle to mostly recover from the imbalances created from being too eager.

-Light warmup as above
-15-20 OC singles spaced out over an hour or so with a gripper that is tough for you

You may notice there aren't any negatives in here.. They haven't worked for me but that's not to say they wouldn't for you. You just have to experiment with what works for you. Will write some more about this one of these days so stay tuned. This IS NOT meant to replace the excellent articles available by Jedd, Heath or anyone else I may have missed. It's just meant to relay what has and hasn't worked for me and help you decide what you would like to do.