What Are Dual-Panel Gym Grips? The New Category Explained

Most gym grips are one-trick tools. Palm pads protect skin on pulls. Straps hold you to the bar. Fat Gripz make the bar harder to hold on purpose. Until now, nothing in the category was designed around the one thing that actually determines how good a rep is, which is the quality of the contact between your hand and the weight, on both sides of your training.

Quick answer: a dual-panel gym grip is a lifting grip with two engineered contact panels, one optimised for pressing and one for pulling. Rather than just protecting the palm, the panels improve stability, force transfer and muscle activation across presses, pulls, curls and cable work, attaching to any equipment. PUMPZ by LIFTLABZ is a new invention, and currently the first and only grip of its kind.

Why your hands are the weak link in most lifts

Every rep you perform sends force through the same bottleneck, your hands. On presses, a bar sitting badly in the palm bleeds force through wrist position and pressure hotspots. On pulls, a hand working hard to hold a handle steals neural focus and fatigue budget from the muscle you're trying to train. It's why so many lifters "feel rows in their forearms." Sports science calls part of this the mind-muscle connection, and research on attentional focus shows that being able to direct tension to the target muscle measurably changes activation.

Hands also differ in size, shape and how they naturally rotate through a movement. A fixed bar or handle doesn't accommodate that. This is the problem space PUMPZ was engineered for.

How the dual-panel design works

PUMPZ dual-panel gym grips by LIFTLABZ pair two distinct contact surfaces in one ergonomic, portable unit.

The press side gives the palm a stable platform that distributes force across the hand instead of concentrating it in a strip of skin. The practical result on bench, dumbbell and machine presses is a more stable bar path and stronger-feeling lockouts. Force transfers instead of dissipating.

The pull side improves hand-to-handle contact on rows, pulldowns, curls and cable work, so your grip does its job quietly and the target muscle (lats, biceps, whatever the exercise is for) receives more of the work.

Because the grip isn't worn like a glove or fixed like a bar sleeve, it can be positioned in multiple orientations per exercise. That matters. Everyone's hands are different and move differently, and part of using PUMPZ well is experimenting to find the placement that works for your hands on each lift.

What they're not

PUMPZ is a new invention, not an entry in an existing category, so it gets mistaken for its neighbours. It's not a thick grip, because Fat Gripz-style thick grips exist to overload your forearms, the opposite of improving target-muscle activation. It's not a strap, because straps tether you to the bar for heavy pulls only. And it's not a glove, because nothing is worn, nothing bunches, and bar feel is improved rather than muted. We've compared each in detail in grips vs straps, grips vs Fat Gripz, and grips vs gloves. Or see every type side by side in the types of gym grips guide.

What equipment and exercises do they work with?

PUMPZ attach to essentially anything with a handle, including barbells, dumbbells, fixed and plate-loaded machines, and cable attachments. In practice that covers chest (bench, dumbbell and machine presses, flyes), back (rows, pulldowns, pull-ups), shoulders, biceps and triceps (curls, pushdowns), forearms, and even leg exercises where your hands hold the load, like leg press handles, hack squat grips, Romanian deadlifts and lunges.

Material and durability

PUMPZ panels are made from durable engineered rubber that also solves the unglamorous problems. It spreads the pressure and friction that create calluses, and it wipes clean. The rubber carries a lifetime guarantee. If the material fails, it's replaced.

Where PUMPZ fits in the gym grip landscape

FAQ

PUMPZ, the original dual-panel gym grip. Lifetime guarantee on the rubber. Shop PUMPZ →