High Bar Grips: hands still ripping!

Hey,

I've been training on the high bar for almost 2 months now.  I'm a beginner, btw.  My gymnastics coach is great.  However, I'm having some issues with my hands ripping--every week--despite using grips.

My question: Am I doing something wrong?  Should my hands still be ripping even though I'm not swinging that far?

My swings are almost at horizontal, but I can't go any farther, b/c my hands hurt.  Every week, they rip, and they rip in the same parts (pic below).  My coach tells me that I have to strengthen my hands and the rips are good for me.   

I've started wearing grips recently (in the past 2-3 weeks), and the grips are not helping.  They really rub on the inside of my palms.  The higher I go--especially on the backswings--the more the grips dig into my palms.  The rips are getting a bit worse, I think. 

As of now, I can only last maybe 10 swings before I start to rip.  I'm not even going at full horizontal yet, and my hands still rip!

Is this normal?  My coach seems to think so.  But, I don't know.  There must be something I can do to stop myself from ripping.  Perhaps I'm not using the grips right.  Maybe there's a certain way the dowel's supposed to be positioned to prevent rips?  I asked my coach, and he doesn't think the grips are a problem.  I've also just ordered a larger pair of grips (maybe my current ones are too small?).  Like I said, I'm not going that high.  Maybe, also, I just need to suck it up!  

Thanks for any thoughts!

https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/forum/topic/35-rips/

https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/forum/topic/8906-treating-rips/

Thanks for the links, Jason.  Those are helpful.

I guess, to be more specific, are grips supposed to be this uncomfortable as to cause rips?  I'm not sure if this exists, but is someone able to "read rips"?  That is, are you able to detect errors in technique based on one's hand rips?

I mean, if you look at my rips (pics in the first post), I noticed that there's no rips on both of my index palms.  Maybe my grip's balance is off, and I'm using my last three fingers to grip the bar too much (instead of using my index more).  I don't know.

Or, maybe I should be using the tips of my fingers to grip the bar more, as opposed to my palms.  Is this something I should be thinking about? 

Or, maybe I need to get the grips closer to my second knuckle, so it runs more smoothly in my palms.  Again, I don't know.

I suspect my rips are due to my poor swinging/gripping technique.  I just don't know what I should be doing to correct it.   

Of course you are ripping, you are gripping the bar much too tightly!

Relax your hands and allow the dowels to take your weight.  Think of curling the fingers around the bar, not gripping it with a fist.  The thumbs should only lightly touch the tip of the index finger.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

Another tip Coach Sommer taught me when I have rips like that is to soak my hands in warm salt water solutiion for 30 minutes until healed. I really helps heal and toughs the skin also. Coach also said they used to spray their rips with Brut men cologne but the salt water soak is better.

Coach Sommer said:

Of course you are ripping, you are gripping the bar much too tightly!

 

Relax your hands and allow the dowels to take your weight.  Think of curling the fingers around the bar, not gripping it with a fist.  The thumbs should only lightly touch the tip of the index finger.

 

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

Thanks a lot, Coach Sommer, for your reply!  Will definitely try not to grip the bar so tight this week.  Can't wait to try this out!

bjcook said:

Another tip Coach Sommer taught me when I have rips like that is to soak my hands in warm salt water solutiion for 30 minutes until healed. I really helps heal and toughs the skin also. Coach also said they used to spray their rips with Brut men cologne but the salt water soak is better.

Thanks, bjcook!  I'll give the salt water soak a try.  

To elaborate on Coach's answer: when you're using bar grips, you don't want to hold on to the bar the same way you do when you don't have grips. You want to let the dowel do the work for you. At first, this may feel a little bit precarious, because it means loosening your grip and opening up your hand a bit. With grips, you should feel most of the weight in your fingers. One thing that may help is standing on a block beneath the bar so you can easily reach it, and then experimenting with different hand positions. Eventually you should be able to figure it out. If you like, I can try to post a picture on Monday to help illustrate.

Joshua Slocum said:

To elaborate on Coach's answer: when you're using bar grips, you don't want to hold on to the bar the same way you do when you don't have grips. You want to let the dowel do the work for you. At first, this may feel a little bit precarious, because it means loosening your grip and opening up your hand a bit. With grips, you should feel most of the weight in your fingers. One thing that may help is standing on a block beneath the bar so you can easily reach it, and then experimenting with different hand positions. Eventually you should be able to figure it out. If you like, I can try to post a picture on Monday to help illustrate.

Thanks, Joshua!  Thanks very helpful!  It makes things very clear now!  I'm at my gym on Tue, so will definitely give it a go then.  

I'm so glad to hear that this isn't normal!  I can tolerate rips, but just not every time I'm on the high bar, which is every week.  

Thanks, again, everyone for chiming in!

I just found this web site, and have not looked for related advice on any other thread.  What I want to say may be beyond obvious to everybody, and not mentioned because of that.

However, it seems like there may be a VERY important piece of advice that you are missing. Especially when I look at your attached photo.

You have to remove excess callous from your hands on a very regular basis, or you WILL rip. This needs to be done probably about twice a week, more or less, depending on how much swing time you get. And the callouses keep growing for quite a while after you stop abusing your skin, like maybe 2-3 months.

(Don't you just love that moment when you are in the middle of a swing, and you feel something that feels like  you are wearing a glove that just ripped, and you say to yourself: "Great! 10-30 seconds before some serious pain sets in." If you really want to know the pain, try ripping skin off of the inside of your thumb.

 You can tell that it was your skin and not your grip that ripped, because if it had been the grip, you would probably already be experiencing an unplanned, rotating aerial event. Been there, done that too.)

I don't know currently preferred methods of callous removal. Back in the day (decades ago when I last ripped), we used to just soak our hands, (often just by taking a long shower), and then use a regular T-shaped face razor on the callouses. 

The callouses will get very soft from soaking, and when used carefully and gently, a razor will very selectively cut off callous without cutting into the rest of the skin. If you do not press really hard, it will never just cut in deep. I've never know anybody to bleed when using this method gently and carefully.

Of course, back then, they did not even sell dual blade razors. A single blade might preferable. 

**********************

Anecdote: Cultural differences:  My ex-wife and I learned from each other that we had both developed habits of self-torture that were no longer serving useful purposes.

In my case, having lost skin to the bar more than a few times, I learned that habit that with any kind of blister, I would IMMEDIATELY cut off all the ripped skin, trim the edges and expose it to the air.  Why? Because I wanted to get back on the bar ASAP, and this makes the recovery much faster. But also a whole lot more painful!  I had to have it explained to me that if you get a blister on you foot, you might just leave it alone for a week and let it heal on its own schedule, while experiencing a lot less pain. Duh!

My ex spent a lot of time in dance school as a teenager. For similar reasons, she learned the habit that if your leg falls asleep (from sitting in a position that cuts off some circulation), that the thing to do was to stand up and stamp the ground repeatedly until it stopped feeling funny. Yea, that works faster, and she no doubt used this a few times in the middle of dance class.  However, as I explained to her and I had known for a long time, this torture method is not necessary if you are not in a hurry.  If you identifying the reason your circulation was cut off and fix that, and then sit really still for a few minutes longer, you can let your leg wake up without feeling any of that unpleasantness.

Dear moderator: Perhaps you might add the following comment to my previous post, which I just submitted:

or perhaps just approve it as is.

From the photos you attached, it looks pretty obvious that on your left hand ring finger callous, you ripped it once, and failed to trim the edges of the skin adequately before you ripped it again! And on your right middle finger callous, there looks like perhaps days worth of healing along the bottom edge, but you still have dead skin attached at the top from the same painful event. You are definitely doing something wrong here, even if you do sometimes remove callous before the bar steals it all from you.

So a little more explicitly than before: When you do rip, the fastest healing will take place if you immediately remove all the dead skin neatly, and around the edges you really need to use a razor on soaked skin. Failure to do this means that you have a piece of dead skin creating a mechanical liability that tries harder to rip you again.   It also means that the skin around the edges that is still being covered by pieces of remaining callous that you should have removed is not being exposed to the air as much, and failing to develop into tough, pain-free callous as quickly, possibly leading to a localized skin weakness where your next tear will form.