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Tell me please what is the most natuaral way to say that I want someone to grab a barbell with hands close to each. Here are exaples:
Grip the bar closely to activate your triceps before doing a close-grip barbell barbell bench press!
Grip the bar with your hand close to each other to activate your triceps before doing a close-grip barbell press.
The second varian is wordy, so I would like to know a shorter natural version of saying that in a less short fasion.
I agree with Jason's point that specificity is more important than brevity if you can injure yourself by doing that lift incorrectly. That said, let's look at another linguistic option open to you.
Grip the bar with hands close together for the barbell bench press.
For the barbell bench press, grip the bar with hands close together.
Not the absence of determiner before hands and the use of the with "barbell bench press", and the phrase close together.
The first sentence doesn't work because, more often than not, closely will either be interpreted as tightly or as an instruction to hold the bar close to your body.
I would suggest simply:
Grip the bar with both hands.
Are you talking about gripping a bar with both hands or a barbell? (The question indicates both.) If it's actually a barbell, then both hands will be close together by necessity.
However, if it's a bar, then I believe this would result in somebody naturally gripping it with their hands separated by a shoulder width.
If that is not the intended result, then just saying close to each other would not be ideal either.
If you want to be specific, you need to give specific instructions:
Grip the bar with your hands 6" apart.
It seems to me that specificity is far more important than sentence length in this case.
