from a strap or belt which is kept in place by squeezing the handles of a gripper hard enough to keep the weight from falling one of many training innovations he pioneered. Arm wrestlers were among the first to establish specific training protocols using grippers, as part of a larger strength training program for their sport. Ratings and accuracy To explain the amount of variability to expect, grippers have been likened to uncalibrated barbell plates, which at its most basic level means that they will have greater variations than calibrated barbell plates (i.e., barbell plates that must conform to narrowly defined, pre-established standards), but there is evidence that substantial levels of accuracy are achievable for grippers. Grippers are commonly rated in such units as pounds per square inch to inch-pounds to inches, but arguments have been presented that in many cases these numbers have little real meaning and in all cases they are not as transparent as the label (in pounds or kilos) on a barbell plate, so they should be viewed with caution. Similarly, “calibration” is sometimes misused, as when a gripper is rated, whether subjectively or objectively, Instead of made to conform to an external standard. Misconceptions Along with misstatements about calibration, two other misconceptions about grippers were introduced in 2003. One of the notions was that the characteristics of the springs in grippers would change over the course of a certain number of repetitions before they stabilized, in a process that was labeled “seasoning.” An alternative view is that a spring will bend when the force required to close the gripper exceeds the spring's mechanical limits, but that such bending does not occur in grippers that are properly designed and built. Such bending would make the gripper easier to close on successive attempts, while the grippers with springs that did not bend would remain constant. The arm of a torsion spring with the sharper bend was termed the “dogleg”, and while noting that it would make no difference in the force required to close the gripper, it was stated that it took “less effort” to initially deflect the gripper if one pushed on the dogleg. Others have argued that grippers are symmetric with regard to forces applied to the handles and that the dogleg is another myth, and this has been demonstrated with an analysis of the underlying physics, but the concepts remain in use. Subjective reports