My wrists always hurt doing handstands

Hi . so I was learning handstand for around 3 months now several days a week for 10-40 minutes a day. I can hold handstand for 30 seconds maximum if I am lucky, but the problem are my wrists. They always hurt. You would think that after 3 months they would get used to weight but it's always painful.

 

Do you guys have the same problem or after certain amount of time they actually get used to and don't hurt?

This is very common. Are you properly warming up and stretching your wrists before each session? Because you should be!

 

Wrist pushups are the next phase in preparing your wrists. A search in the forum will reveal some detailed posts on this movement. I would definitely make sure you start slow, on your knees, when starting this and work up to the plank position over a time frame of weeks, not days. You don't want to injure your wrists further doing this.

Yes I am doing a lot of stretching and warmup for wrists. But don't you think that wrist pushups will be too much stress for them, because they are sore everyday just from handstands? 

 

As far as I know connective tissue takes a lot of time to recover, so I don't know if I should increase my workload for wrists or decrease and get them some rest.

If your wrist are already injured you need to be considering taking time off now before your injury worsens.

It's very unlikely your wrist will improve unless you take time off.

I know this because I've been in your exact situation and suffered for it.

What do you mean by "injured"? They are not injured, they just always sore/painful due to load. My wrists are very small but I weight quite decent amount 84 kilos, so I guess it's hard to them to get accustomed to load.

Tiger Balm, everyday.

You need to let your wrists heal. Doing the wrist exercises suggested will help you in long run. In handstand your wrist is like your ankle. If you don't strengthen your ankles you will always have weak ankle muscles.

ChildInTime said:

Do you guys have the same problem or after certain amount of time they actually get used to and don't hurt?

I did, same thing, except i probably trained twice as hard on them. Relax, everythings fine. Take time off your wrists, dont be a dum-dum.

Use some sort of balm that creates the menthol burn and you will heal, but be easy, you will be ok if you train without pain. If pain comes back, take another break. I had to go through some serious wrist pain, shooting pain, because im a stubborn dum-dum, but after resting and sensing when to stop, and using menthol balm, my wrist's adapted to the load, which is 5'6, 180lbs.

Tendonosis is an injury. It may be acute now, but it can become chronic if you do not allow it to heal.

 

I would guess your wrist pain is because you are doing too much work for the current state of your tendon development.

 

It takes 3-4 months for the tendons to adapt.

 

Look up Steady State Training.

Well I have absolutely no pain on wrists when I am resting. It's only painful when I am doing handstands and immediately after I finish them, so I doubt it's tendinitis.

 

Thanks everyone.

Stretch is not enough. You need to strengthen your wrists. What you need is fully covered in handstand one.

I mentioned doing wrist pushups on your knees. If you feel like that is too much, you can start off by doing "granny wrist pushups". Ie, wrist pushups against the wall.

You started with far too much daily volume. Far too much. You need to take 1-2 weeks off of handstand work completely and then begin again; this time with more prudence and much less volume.

Your wrists will tell you when you are being overly ambitious.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

Thanks everyone

 

today for some reason right after coming out of handstand i get strong rushing headache, feels like the blood is quickly coming into my head, even if I hold only few seconds. Never happened before, maybe too much sodium increased my BP or something..