Protect your workout hands with these quick tips

Hand Care and Prevention

Tears

The first thing you should do when you rip your hands is to clean out the wound with warm water and soap. It will probably hurt a little but you’re going to want to get anything that could cause an infection out ASAP.

I actually like to keep the ripped skin on for a little. It kind of acts as a bandaid to keep the healthy skin underneath clean. If it’s almost all the way off, you can go ahead and finish the job!

After you get home put neosporin to help the wound heal faster. After tearing my hands quite a bit I found out that this helps out a lot in the healing process. Try to keep it most throughout the night. I will put a loose bandage over the rip with the neosporin under to make sure it still gets air but keeps moist. Some people have even put a sock over their hand to make sure the neosporin doesn’t whip away while sleeping.

The last part which might be the most important but definitely the hardest to control is after the rip almost fully heals, there is usually a deep cut in the “palmar flexion creases”, I had to google the medical term for that. Basically the creases in your skin that run through your palm. If your rip runs through one of these creases, its going to be deep and take more time to heal. Now depending on how you slept the night before, hand open or hand closed, your hand might keep tearing in that crease. If you can be dedicated enough to sleep with your hand open you shouldn’t run into this problem. If the crease does heal up with your hand closed, every time you open your hand up you’re probably going to re rip that same crease over and over. This could go on for a week or more… and it hurts.

Prevention

There are several different kinds of hand protectors that you can try out and see which one works best for you. I feel like it’s more of a personal preference. Hand protection is really helpful if your hands are already tender from the day before or if you know you’re about to do a workout that has a lot of pull ups, deadlifts, etc. Some different kinds of grips include, leather, cloth, and tape. Ask a coach for their recommendation if you want some more advice on which type is best for you.

A trick you can use if you’re in the middle of a workout and you feel your hands about to rip is to slightly change your hand position on the bar. For example, if your doing pull ups and you usually use a thumbs over grip or monkey grip, you can change to a thumbs under grip which will put most of the weight towards the base of your fingers rather than the middle of the palm. If that still fails you can change to a fingertip grip. This obviously will hurt your performance because your grip will give out a lot faster, but you didn’t rip and you finished the workout! I try to avoid tearing as much as possible. The tear will be there for a couple days and will bother you during workouts and also because it isn’t fun to have, ever.

Try these tips out next time you’re having hand issues and let us know if you have any questions!