Arm wrestling is developing rapidly and in the near future, athletes will be able to build a career and earn money doing their favorite thing.

Due to such prospects, the number of people interested in and engaged in arm wrestling is increasing every day, which inevitably draws certain difficulties and questions.

Today we consider one of these questions: how many fundamental pulling styles exist?

It is customary to assume that there are 4 main styles: toproll, hook, side pressure and relatively recent the unfortunate king’s move. Is it really so?

We will offer you a simple, but at the same time quite accurate and understandable way to divide styles. Let's start with the question: which movement in armwrestling is considered the most effective and which only a few can ignore? Obviously, this bending of the wrist, it causes the opponent’s hand to fall into the supine position, in which the pronators and the brachioradialis are deactivated, which transfers most of the load to the opponent’s biceps, while literally eliminating the counterattack. A dead wrist also increases the lever and, accordingly, the load on the muscles that hold the angle between the forearm and the humerus, and the same pronators.

On this basis, we propose to separate styles according to the vector of wrist movement. To fight toproll, the wrist will always tend to be higher than the opponent's. And to fight hook, your wrist will tend to go around the opponent's one from outside of you - thus doing the bending of the wrist in the classic version, or inwards along the grip, revealing in the form of a pulling in triceps.

In this case, king’s move ceases to be a separate style, since it is in fact a technical method of combat in a protective position in the toproll fight. But with the side pressure everything is not so clear. It is also a technical method, but unlike king’s move, it can be used both in toproll fighting, the classic example is the Andrew “Cobra” Rhodes fight, and in the hook fight, as Devon Larratt did in armfight with Taras Ivakin.

The situation with the definition of armwrestling style or technique is very similar to the definition of the type of shape of a person. It is believed that there are three basic types: mesomorph, ectomorph, and endomorph, and in practice each person combines these types, and only a few can be close to any particular one. It is the same in arm wrestling: individual data of an athlete gives rise to new techniques, such as high hook or king’s move, and various attack vectors of classical styles.

As a result, we have two fundamental styles, which are complemented by certain techniques.