WOD

This is a post I feel that I need to do on a monthly basis. Hand care / maintenance. 

If you are regularly participating in a sport or training style that involves a ton of gripping, preventing injuries to your hands is vital. 

Callouses are often a symbol of pride of all the hard work you put in. Unfortunately this is the old school way of thinking. You get callouses from repetitive strain to your skin. Your body thickens the skin in order to help protect it. The issue with this is that is leaves a really hard, dry, and thick piece of skin surrounded by smoother skin. s is almost always where you will tear. The callous peels back leaving a big open sore on your hand. Not cool. This will derail your training for days or weeks and increases your risk of infection. 

Prevention

These callouses happen from friction. 

1- Chalk is meant to dry out sweat, it’s not a performance enhancing powder. You need a little if your hands are sweaty, too much actually increases friction and increases your risk of tears. 

2- A loose grip leads to tears. The more your hands move around on that barbell / bar the more friction there is. Grab the bar with a firm and strong grip and minimize the movement of your hand and fingers. 

3- Listen to your body. Generally you knew before you are going to tear. You will feel a “hot spot” of your hand from the friction. Switch exercises to something with less friction to save your hands for another day. 

Maintenance

You need to file down those callouses on a regular basis. Generally I recommend doing it whenever you trim your nails. It makes it easy to remember to do it all at once. You need to file the hard spots down and remove any tough edges. Now there is great debate and personal preference as to which method is best. 

The most common is a simple pumice stone, the same one that many people use on their feet to get rid of rough skin. There are specific callous shavers, which are razor sharp blades that trim the skin down. While they are very effective, I tend to go to far with these and end up cutting myself. There is a definite skill and art to using these. The most simple and effective way is using a specific device for shaving hand callouses. There have many been invented and market hard sped over the years. I have tried many and like them all. But the one I always stick to because of pure effectiveness and simplicity is something called the PedEgg. A quick little scrub and all the hard spots are smoothed out. 

Just a reminder but you can sit down for a FREE goal setting session with me to help go over a plan to help you reach your goals. If you don’t have any goals, we can also work on that to help give you some motivation and better directions. http://goals.bytown.fit