Headstand mishap due to wrist weakness

[Philip Papandrea]

Hi everyone,

I've been doing the WOD's since august and my overall stregth has been slowly improving, my right shoulder pain is pretty much gone and my elbows have also slowly been getting stronger. This is all great except for the fact that my wrists are getting weaker and weaker. Before I started the WOD's i was doing false grip pullups and also advaced frong stand and lsit on paralletes for about 4x 15s holds. After reading many posts I decided to go back to frog stand on floor and tuck lsits still on parallettes during warmups for half my max which was 30s. This was all going great till I started to feel the burn in the bottom of my wrist/forearm during frogstands after a few weeks.I've since dropped frogstands and started doing some of the wrist prehab although I can barely do the exercises from my knees. I was doing headstand presses the other day during the WOD and I was getting that burning feeling on the underside of my wrist/forearm. I tried to put more of the weight on my head and ended up falling over and pulling something in my neck.

Anyway sorry for the long story but my question is after my neck heals which will also give my wrists a rest what could I do that is more basic than I was already doing to prepare my wrists?

Could the wrist prehab be hurting me more then helping since its so hard? Would the wrist wroller work the underside of my forearm and wrist better?

Also do you think moving lsit to the floor will be easier on the wrists than frogstand was? Is that one of the reasons its a prereq?

The WOD's have been really great for me except for this wrist thing and now I paid the price in a roundabout way by hurting my neck compensating for my wrists. Don't want that to happen again.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

Philip

[Blairbob]

take some time off

start the wrist rehab series while standing with your wrists on a wall

or start them from your knees and have your wrists start as close to your knees as possible and them move them farther out from there

[Joshua Naterman]

Wrist rollers are good, but the ones you hold are of limited value. You'll be better off mounting one in your rings. I will put a video up tomorrow to show how this would work. I was supposed to have that up this week but forgot! Anyhow, high rep work for the wrists is good, they are no different than any other joint... heavy low rep work and lighter high rep work are both important.

I will say that moving your L sit to a flat surface will help a LOT, and definitely do not give up on the false grip work! That, as you probably have figured out, is pretty good wrist flexor work all by itself!

Don't try and jump into the wrist work too fast, just take it slow and figure out what the best volume for you is. You will find that having one heavy day per week and 2-3 much lighter days will probably work the best for you... you will need the growth hormone that higher rep training produces to heal whatever is going on in your wrists.

[Philip Papandrea]

Thanks guys

I'm going to take the week off and then start back in slowly. I'm going to move the lsits to the floor and see if I get the same pain. hopefully not. Will stick with the wrist series on the wall. I think I jumped too quick to try it on the floor. I also bought some 2 inch diameter pipe and am going to make a roller that I can rest on the rings and use like you said.

Slizzardman I know you said go heavy one day and light the others so I figured I'd change the weight on the end of the roller accordingly. Do you think one set of winding the weight all the way up and back down during warmup is sufficient or should I be doing more than this?

[Alvaro Antolinez]

Also if wrist are not improving with the prehab or even you feel pain while you do the exercises check with an hosteopath. some tumbling made my semilunar wrist bones a bit displaced and no amount of prehab could heal that. With one simple movement they were back in place. They told me this is a very usual problem due to falls over your hand.