wide-arm (palms facing outward) HS

[kaiowas]

Hey guys

I was recently diagnosed with a ganglion cyst in my right wrist, that is fairly deep inside and not physically visible, but extremely painful whenever my wrist bends backward for planche, handstand and even pushups. After a few months of rest and anti-inflammatory drugs my wrist is exactly the same. However, I have decided to return to training (as it is my stress relief and I miss the ability to exercise) and have been working around the pain trying to look for ways to perform exercises without too much discomfort, I can perform most bar exercises without any pain and pulling exercises are fine. It is pushing exercises I find where I struggle. I can perform pushups on my knuckles and fingertips (to a point) and have found I can keep my hand flat on the floor during wide-arm pushups, with my fingertips facing outward. But handstands and planche exercises I find is where I struggle. Without the ability to have my fingers facing forward and my wrist bent back I find it very difficult to maintain balance, knuckles and fingertips are fairly difficult to keep balance for me, but I have noticed some gymnasts perform handstands with arms wide and the fingertips facing outward (i think it is called the japanese handstand). Admittedly I am not as wide as most gymnasts are i've seen on youtube, but I am definitely more than shoulder width apart but still struggle to maintain balance. I was wondering if anyone else practices the wide-arm handstand, as I have been trying it myself, mostly against the wall first, but I still find it difficult to maintain balance as my fingertips and palm are no longer there for control and I only have my thumb and pinky finger to control. Any help would be much appreciated, as I miss being able to press to handstand and have that feeling of control while in a handstand.

[Mikael Kristiansen]

I recently wrote this as a reply about your ganglion, not sure if you saw it(this is copy pasted):

I am doing several hours of handstands every day, and I have had a ganglion on my right wrist a couple of times. They basically are membranes with carpal fluid inside, and mine appeared on the top of my wrist after too many drops to planche from handstand on the floor. I never had much pain, but it was slightly discomfortable to do handstand. The first time, I tried smashing it, which had it return a month or so later. After that I stopped doing planche drops entirely for a while, and it dissapeared completely. I also know others who had them dissapear after a while. Anti inflammatories will do you no good as far as I know, since ganglions have nothing to do with inflammation.

How much can you flex your wrist without pain? If you can get it to a certain angle without pain you should build yourself a couple of decline handstand blocks. What you do is that you try to find the angle where you can apply pressure without pain and cut yourself 2 blocks(fitting your palm, I can give you some measurements tomorrow) which you cut at an angle so that you can do handstands, pushups, etc on these. In the circus community such blocks are quite normal. I have a guy in my class who had wrist surgery over a year ago, and up until now he has been doing handstands on decline blocks to save his wrist. He can finally do on the floor without pain, but for longer sessions he still uses those. Decline blocks might save your handstand training all together if you find an angle you can put pressure on the wrist without pain.

If there seems like there is no other option and you can not flex your wirst enough to use blocks for teh time being, maybe you should look into the surgical solutions.

As for handstands with fingers outwards, you obviously need to work harder with alignment and balance since you have less fore to apply to the floor. Basically you end up balancing from only 2 fingers, which is hard, but will become more consistent with practice. I is completely possible to balance without the fingers at all, for example, by standing on a ledge and having the fingers just hang inactive, but as said, it requires good form and stability.

[Joshua Naterman]

Are parallel bars/paralletes an option or do those hurt as well?

[kaiowas]

Thanks Handbalancer. Sorry I had not checked my other post yet, but thought I would see if I could get any new information from the handstand forum. As I mentioned before my ganglion is not visible and sits quite deep inside my wrist, which creates a significant amount of pain and unable to be smashed.

I am unable to put my shoulders over my wrists (as needed in the planche and handstand) but even with my wrists still slightly in front of my shoulders I can still feel the pain, just not as intense. This is just testing it during a pushup stance, it is much much worse during handstand to the point where it becomes unbearable to hold for more than a second. But I will keep looking at different ways to maintain the stance. If I do use angled blocks, they will require a fairly steep angle I think as the pain is still there.

I have seen people do handstands over ledges without fingers, as you mentioned, but they still have the ability to use their forward facing palm to control, while a sideways facing palm has very little control. But I will keep trying to maintain a correct alignment for the fingers facing outward handstand and see how I go. Thanks for your help.

Slizzardman, I have tried pbars and parralettes, however it is the same situation. With my hands shoulder width apart the weight is still bearing down on that part of my wrist, but I can use them but it is almost the same situation with wide arm handstand on the floor except worse, because the parralettes I have tip over to the side. I might need to make some new ones with a much wider base.

[Blairbob]

I work them because I was training negative wide arm HS/japanese HS/invert cross HS on floor presses awhile back besides playing with roll/jumps to it.

Less flexion on your wrist but not exactly easy to balance.