Lifting straps are an essential gym bag item if you do any serious amount of deadlifting or pulling exercises. (And no, straps aren’t cheating if you know when to use them.) But there are several different types, and it’s important to match your straps to the type of lifting you do.
I own four types of straps (up from three when I originally wrote this article in 2021), and I love each for a different reason--except the lasso straps, I guess, which are fine but which I don’t use very often anymore. As we’ll see, they’re a great all-around strap, but other types are more specialized to different jobs.
All types of lifting straps do the same job: They wrap around your wrists and around the barbell so that you can lift things without fatiguing your grip. You’ll sometimes see them called deadlift straps, because they’re great for deadlifts, or weightlifting straps, because you can use them when training for the sport of weightlifting.
Important note: they are called lifting straps, and not wrist wraps. Wrist wraps are a totally different thing. Try to avoid calling them “wrist straps” too, even though technically they do go around your wrists; you’ll just be adding to the confusion.
Lasso style straps are the cheapest and simplest straps, and the one you’re most likely to find if you walk into a sporting goods store and ask for straps. Here’s a typical model, and you can see why they’re called lasso style. They have a loop, and you pass the other end of the strap through the loop.
You put your wrist through the larger looped part that you've created, and then wrap the long tail around the bar. Importantly, you want the loose part of the strap to go under the bar and wrap toward your fingers. This way, they aren’t just duplicating what your fingers are already doing.
Pros of lasso straps: They’re cheap, they work for any thickness of bar, and they hold well enough for most lifts most people want to do in the gym.
Cons of lasso straps: They take at least a few seconds to set up at the beginning of each lift and to unwrap at the end. They may also not be good enough for extremely heavy lifts, at which point, you should grab a pair of figure 8's.
