Let’s get you what you came here for and quickly give you the honest answer: cupping is a type of isolated strength in armwrestling that involves flexion of the wrist inwards, whereas hooking is a compound movement that encompasses cupping strength and full-body technique.
What Is The Cupping Technique In Armwrestling?
“Cupping” or “cupping strength” is a wrist flexion movement that pulls your wrist and hand towards you. The movement is as if you were cupping your hand around a glass and pulling it towards your chest. From your opponent’s point of view, it bends their wrist backward and drastically reduces the amount of force they can use, as the distance their arm travels to win has lengthened. Building cupping strength requires training with oversized handles that copy the width of a hand (and if feasible, the handles rotate). You quickly rotate the handle towards you to generate strength, speed, and power.
What Is The Hooking Technique In Armwrestling?
In terms of phenomenal armwrestling techniques, hooking is a full-body technique that primarily deploys cupping strength to win a match. You start by cupping your opponent’s hand inwards and then utilize your forearm and bicep strength to draw them closer to your body, effectively “hooking” them in for a standard or high hook. At this point, their arm will be stretched across the table, drastically reducing their leverage. This allows an expert armwrestler to simply apply a little side pressure to pull the opponent’s hand down toward the table for a pin.
The Two Work Together To Make You A Better Armwrestler
While cupping is a type of armwrestling strength, the hooking technique requires you to train your cupping strength for both strength and endurance. From here, you use cupping strength for the dynamic movement of hooking. As to how you train it, for endurance or speed…that is really up to you.
Devon Larratt uses a defensive hook to tire his opponent out and then draw them in towards his body. If an opponent doesn’t get a pin on Devon within the first 5 seconds of the armwrestling match, there is an extremely high probability they are going to lose.
It takes time to develop great cupping strength and even more time to incorporate it into a great hooking technique. You need to train with very large handles (bonus if those handles rotate) to improve your odds of winning at the table!