I see a lot of products. Some of them suck. Most of them are a solid “meh.” Very few of these “revolutionary products” are as valuable as their inventors think they are. Alas, I’m a bit jaded. At the very least, extremely skeptical. It is with this attitude that I first approached Ryker USA’s FIST Grip. If you share this dubious approach to firearms “innovations,” you’ll scan and re-scan every bit of this article. Please do. For the rest of you, I’ll save you some time . . .
The FIST grip works. But before I explain how it works, a little history . . .
Ron Holmes (above) is a 20-year Marine veteran who served with Force Recon and Marine Special Operations. Ron developed the FIST Grip to combat the wear and tear on his body inflicted by training and deployment. After he had elbows rebuilt, he found that wearing his full kit on the firing line made his support arm tingle and go numb.
[I know how that feels. I remember wearing my complete combat load, 65 lbs. (without my 40 lbs. aide bag), spending days doing drills or on the range. I was beat, my left shoulder would ache, hurting all the way down to my fingertips. It didn’t get better as I got older.]Generally speaking, it’s tiring holding a rifle up for a long time. Ron designed the FAST Grip to reduce that challenge for our fighting men and women and, of course, you.
The FIST Grip is a polymer forward grip that attaches to any rifle or shotgun rail section, on the side, vertically. The grip portion is not a straight stick, or a triangle hand stop. It’s an oblong shaped knobbish kind of thing that fits in your hand. It doesn’t sit flush with the rail, it stands proud a few inches.
The end result: your supporting hand reaches much more straight forward from your shoulder, making a vertical fist. It’s exactly like having a good, two-handed high grip on a pistol. Your support hand is farther forward of your firing hand, and to the side a bit.
It seems simple. Because it is simple. So simple that it’s easy to dismiss. Don’t. Seeing didn’t make me a believer. Hearing Ron’s pitch did not make me a believer. Even feeling it in my hand, at first, didn’t make me a believer. The timer did.
The first firearm I fitted was the FIST Grip: the new Smith and Wesson M&P15 with Crimson Trace and LinQ (review pending). I shot the simple standing Mozambique drills in normal day clothes at the 25 and 50 yard mark, both with and without the FIST grip.
The timer revealed a small advantage with the FIST Grip installed. A four percent improvement over the overage of 50 rounds. Then I started shooting targets both walking forward and horizontally (two targets, four-round strings). The time advantage grew slightly. For the next 200 rounds I shot 15 rounds strings while moving and shooting at different targets.
I didn’t feel any difference in the recoil. If you’d have asked me if there was any time savings with the FIST Grip, I would’ve said no. But the timer told the tale. The strings shot with the FIST Grip in situ were 11 percent faster. If the game is life and death, 11 percent is non-trivial.
The next day, I did the exact same drill with S&W M&P10 in .308 (review also pending). The advantage grew to 17 percent. The heavier the recoil, the faster I shot the gun. So I mounted the FIST Grip to the rail section on the side of my Mossberg 500s 12 gauge shotguns.
Mounting the FIST Grip to the pump action itself made racking the gun quicker than racking the Mossie using normal under-the-barrel-hold. You rack the shotgun like making little rabbit punches forward and back. It’s crazy fast.
Fast chambering and better recoil management showed a clear advantage for a FIST Grip-enabled pump action shotgun, even on shorter strings. Three shot transition on targets left, right, and left again revealed an 18.875 percent advantage for the FIST Gripped Mossberg vs the traditional naked foregrip.
So the FIST Grip enables faster shooting and shotgun administration. But that wasn’t its primary purpose.
When a soldier wears Interceptor Body Armor (IBA) or Improved Outer Tactical Vest (IOTV) he has to use his shoulder to push the armor out of the way, to get their support hand over the rifle’s handguard. That’s why you see a lot of soldiers holding the gun at the magazine well; they can’t reach out to the rifle and still square up on the target to move forward, or at least not for long.
So I donned my IBA and full IOTV and put a FIST-equipped shotgun to the test. It worked as advertised. Not having to fight my gear kept me in a better firing position, more mobile, and less tired. On a long course, I saw anywhere from a 30 to 45 percent increase in my total speed during the string of fire.
The FIST Grip works. How much it works depends on weapon and armor. Fair enough.But that’s not all that’s important. My first concern was that something at the end of my muzzle sticking out sideways would catch on stuff.
In two weeks of shooting with the FIST Grip installed on multiple platforms, with slings and way too much gear on me, it didn’t catch on anything. Now that I think of it, my old forward grip didn’t either through years of use and plenty of combat. The FIST Grip sticks out much less than the forward grip did, so I don’t really see it as a major concern.
My next big concern: reliability. The FIST Grip is light, weighing in at only 3.25oz. Ryker USA tells me that the exact polymer blend is proprietary, but it is “very close to the majority of polymer gun components, and will perform very similarly in feel, strength and durability as a result.” I pressed it up against a pallet staked into the ground and leaned into it with all my weight and fired off the Mossy one round at a time with it for a full magazine. It didn’t break. Good enough.
During the long strings of fire with the M&P ARs I found a final benefit: the FIST Grip moves your hand away from the heat of the gas block. (Although I have a few AKs, none of them have any rails on them.)
The FIST Grip looks different. It looks weird. But there’s no doubt that this is one of the rare products that lived up to the hype.
Ryker USA FIST Grip
MSRP: $99
Rating (out of five stars):
Overall * * * * *
The FIST Grip helped me shoot faster, move easier and tire more slowly. Its simple design is elegant in function and solves more problems than it was created to fix. It’s a heck of a thing.
![[SHOT 2026] Beretta AX800 Suprema Semi-Auto Shotgun](https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/20260118_135047-scaled.jpg)
Huh.
So, the FAST Grip is kinda like a ‘Brody knob’ for a long gun?
(Steering wheel knob. On *very* old cars-trucks, it made cranking around the steering wheel around a few times a *lot* easier.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xoxWOTUP9E
I didn’t know those had an actual name. “Brody Knob” you say? Beats the WAY more racist epithet I heard while making one for my van out of an old crystal doorknob… literally last Saturday!
It actually reminded me of the same thing. But it doesn’t rotate.
Gee, we always just called them “necking knobs” because you could drive with your left hand and have your right arm around your sweetie. (This WAS before bucket seats, too)
Ok, having seen the product before, seeing it on the shotgun makes it make more sense to me.
This is a pretty cool idea, but keeping your arm extended straight is generally more tiring than keeping it at an angle. I’d have to try it out before dropping the $100. Not to mention potentially applying non-vertical torque to the front handguard (both due to weight balance and pivot point).
If nothing else, you’d think that 3-position smallbore folks would have given it a try many years ago and yet I’ve never seen anything from Anschutz, Feinwerkbau or Walther that comes close to it.
Still, I’ll be looking around for one of these at the range to see if someone might be willing to let me give it a try, since it really is an interesting idea.
Those three position shooters don’t move. If you are still and shooting at still targets, or not transitioning quickly between targets, I see little value in this product.
Well, if it catches on I have to presume other manufacturers will come out with similar products which should drive the prices down.
No doubt, they have their hands full with donations from HarveyWood and the enabling pedophile-rape culture.
I’m torn. Part of me wants to scream, “GET OFF MY LAWN WITH YER NEWFANGLED FLIBBERTY-GIBBIT!” but your glowing report gives me pause. I do not like how it looks. There, I said it. But if it works… I probably still won’t buy one. Sorry, I’m just too shallow about cosmetics I guess.
I felt that exact same way about AFGs. Just weird things dangling of the bottom of the rail.
Then I tried one on a friend’s gun. It was a bit weird at first, but then I found it definitely put less stress on my arm vs a standard hand-guard grip. Consequently my times went down and my standing accuracy went up. No one was more surprised than me.
This thing just looks weird. I may have to try one out though.
I guess when governments are doing all of the killing, it’s okay. Because he forgot to mention Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Hitler, etc., etc. I guess it’s also okay when masses of ordinary citizens are killed, but when a few notable figures are killed, it’s a bigger deal, somehow.
I think more people have died at the hands of their own government through the course of history than by any other means. Of course, most of them were disarmed first.
Shootings abroad since 1980
1982 South Korea ( 57 killed / 38 injured )
1987 Britain ( 16 killed / 11 injured )
1989 France ( 14 killed )
1989 Canada ( 14 killed )
1990 new Zealand ( 11 killed )
1995 France ( 16 killed )
1996 Britain ( 16 children killed )
1996 Australia ( 35 killed )
2001 Nepal ( 10 killed )
2002 Germany ( 16 killed )
2008 Finland ( 10 killed )
2009 Germany ( 13 killed )
2010 Britain ( 12 killed / 11 injured )
2011 Norway ( 77 killed / 319 injured )
2015 France ( 138 killed / 350 injured )
JWT, thanks for the review. Sucker LOOKS uncomfortable as billy hell to me, I think I would just laugh at it without the review. I may have to give it a try. Is it “one size fits all”, or do I need a different one for different guns?
Dumb question: couldn’t you get similar effects with a trimmed-down traditional vert. grip simply mounted in the nine-o-clock position? What advantage does a vertical side-mounted grip have over a traditional vertical grip in the six-o-clock position? It would seem to be performing the same function at a slightly different angle. 11-17% time reduction is nothing to sneeze at, I’m just wondering how that would compare to a traditional vertical grip. Sorry if I missed it in the article.
I’ve had the pleasure of shooting sub machine guns basically mounted exactly how you are talking. It puts your hand in the wrong position, forcing you to swing the muzzle vertically in recoil as well as tiring out your shoulder even faster. The forward fist position for your hand is natural and allows your shoulder and bicep to support the gun as it should.
How would this innovation fare with respect to proposed “bump-fire” regulation?
All the talk about a “bump-fire ban” is (IMO) mis-focused. The Anti’s and PotG are all talking about bump-stock artifacts. Instead, we should be concentrating on the texts of proposed bills.
Our political position ought to be that we are not invested in “bump-stocks” per se; rather, we are keenly interested in any legislation which might “infringe” on the right to keep and bear arms. It’s all in the text of the legislation and how that text might be applied.
Looks to me as if this innovation would aid in increasing the rate-of-fire of a long-arm. As such, it would run-afoul of the text of at least one bill I’ve seen. WTF? How is it that a hand-grip mounted on the barrel of a long-arm becomes – through the magic of a proposed law – a “machine-gun”? This device in no way participates in the mechanisms we call the “action” or “trigger” or “fire-control”.
This is an excellent example of how the creepy-crawler gun-control statues effect their infringement on law-abiding gun users and innovations that migrate from civilian use to serve our military in vital combat roles.
So much estrogen so little brains
This does not happen in Europe, Canada, Japan or Australia on a daily basis.
These countries have excellent healthcare, education, social safety nets, low homelessness, excellent food safety, good economies and a population that treats itself as family, superb freedoms.
Meanwhile this country has High murders, Higher suicide rates, Higher obesity rates, Most Americans suffer from health problems like heart-disease and type-2 diabetes, piss-poor education, High rates of violent crimes. Laws that disenfranchise minority communities (Thanks Gun Reich supporters), Rising incidents of terrorism caused by doomsday prepper nuts and right-wing militia fanatics and the rise of fascism in the country and you people continue to support it.
Strange that will never happen here since you russian puppets voted for an even bigger russian stooge.
These places continue to do fine without NRA nuts going postal.
Please keeping living your delusions that the civilized world is hitler-land 2.0, I’ve been to these countries many times to know you toothless pseudo-intellectual hicks and your fascist Klan-master Robert farrago are full of shit.
Hi there friends, how is the whole thing, and what you desire to say concerning this article, in my view its
actually remarkable for me.
It sounds to me, that you are a strict Constitutionalist. What the Consitution says is what it means.
Perhaps the ideal system is to follow the “no victim, no crime rule”. Nothing is expressly illegal, but if what you do results in injury to another person you will be punished.
I might try one……..if it were $15.
‘Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited.
And that is absolute rubbish. Are there any limits to the freely exercising your 1st Amendment rights? No. Now if that free exercise infringes upon the rights of another, such as defamation, then there is a problem. But carrying a firearm infringes upon no ones rights. Yet even Scalia believed that preventing free exercise is the same as punishing bad exercise. And he was wrong.
It’s not that we decide for ourselves what our rights are, it is simply a matter of these truths being self evident if we are honest about them with ourselves and others.
Statists just won’t let themselves accept the concept of natural law.
“…Mossberg announces the release of a 20-gauge version of the 590 Shockwave.”
Hello! 😉
Do they make those shorty mini-shells in 20 Ga.?
…the modern-day six-shooter. It may not be quite as portable as a Single Action Army…
All in all, I’d rather have a Single Action Army.
WHAT A BUNCH OF WACKO’S! No wonder this country is going to $#!t!
“…civilian-owned firearms are a significant net positive for society.”
I think this is the point that has to be hammered instead of responding point for point to most anti gunners. Never, ever accept the framework the left puts an issue into, re-frame it in relevant terms, like “more lives saved than lost.”
Arguing that it’s a right won’t do much without a plain understanding of what that right affords us day to day. Yes, it is a basic human right, protected in this countries defining document, however the truth is we have a large swath of the population that have been deliberately not taught what a right really is and why they’re important and many people have been sort of inoculated against the concept.
That review was more cancer than Polonium-210.
So it is a device that is attached to your weapon that allows you to shoot faster? BAAAANNNNNN IT! That makes your rifle fully semi-automatic!
Interesting product,I have some of the same issues with tendons and arms going numb. Due to injuries from my military service.
Might have to try this out.