Starting Out With Damaged Wrists

Hey! Thank you for reading this.

Since this is my first post, I’d like to start off by saying: thank you! Words can't describe how awesome this forum is and the people that hang out here. I've been lurking in the shadows for the past week and a half, spending at least four hours a day here reading all I can about gymnastics. It's great to see such an active forum with so many friendly and knowledgeable athletes.

Bodyweight training is quite a different ball-game for me after three years of training with free-weights. I'm psyched to get started with gymnastics training! But before I truly kick it off, I'd like to try and get a few things clear.

Wrist Damage

A while ago, I got my right wrist injured from breakdancing. Trying too much, too fast, too often, up to the point where I couldn’t put any kind of pressure on it at all anymore. That was about one and a half years ago and it’s healed quite nicely. The only way I notice it’s weaker is when I do a few handstands or frog stands. Doing that a few times still causes pain in my right wrist while my left is feeling absolutely fine.

About two months ago, my left wrist was injured (gotta keep it balanced ). I was putting something heavy away and my left wrist just cracked. It turned out the cartilage was bruised (shifted out of place and popped back) so I had to rest it for a few weeks. I didn’t work out during that time, except for some extra cardio. As my movement returned and the pain went away, I slowly started training again with very low weights after about three to four weeks. It’s been fine most the time, but I still notice I can’t use the full ROM of my left wrist and pressure it. That still causes pain. Even worse: I feel like the pain is increasing these past two weeks.

From what I can tell by digging through these forums, a workout should ideally consist of (in no particular order) warming up, cooling down, pre-hab exercises (joint/mobility work), the ‘real’ workout (i.e. WOD) and the weekly stretching session.

I intend to pay some extra attention to my wrists with the pre-hab exercises, since these are obviously my weak points.

What I had planned out is the following:

Wrist presses (one set per variation, four times per week)

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Variations (2 * 4 = 8 per set): palms up/down * fingers pointing inward/forward/backward/sideways

Wrist push-ups (two sets per workout, twice a week – still doing these from the knees currently, and piked)

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There’s a few other exercises I intend to do for pre-hab work, such as the

(one set, twice per week), (one set, twice per week), (one set, twice per week), (one set, three times per week), (one set, two times per week) and fingertip hangs (one set, twice per week).

Main concerns

Is this enough volume and frequency or perhaps too much?

Are there any exercises I could/should add to this or replace?

This all sounds like quite a bit of work already, spread out over the week (four workouts). Compared to the pre-hab work I used to do while working with free-weights, this is a very substantial increase.

Edit: As part of my beginner's conundrums, I made a thread about my exercise routine right here, in case you want some extra info regarding my workouts.

Do the wrist mobility series everyday in the warmup. I would add in some dumbbell rotations where you simply hold a DB and rotate it in circles. I like this quite a bit in my wu and throughout my workout. Something like 5-15lbs. Rice bucket work. Or you can alternate them.

Thanks for the advice!

I'll add the wrist mobility series to the warm-ups daily. I only have a question about those dumbbell rotations you mentioned.

Searching for dumbbell rotations on YouTube got me across this, which is just a one-handed version of

(thinking of adding this last one to the pre-hab work as well).

From what you described, I'm guessing it's neither of those movements. If the rice bucket is an alternative for that, I'm thinking the movement would be to simply simulate the movement I'd make in a rice bucket. The only difference is less rice and more dumbbell in my hand. Is that a correct interpretation of the movement?

The rice bucket sounds like fun though. A bit different from the other exercises and if I'm right, rice can stay good for a very long time.

Nope. Hold DB in hand, move wrist in a circle both directions.

Ah, there we go. Got it!

Cheers

DB rotations/rice bucket are good.

Basically what you want to do is let your wrists dictate your volume since they seem to be a limiting factor. If they hurt, you rest and vice versa.

Since they were previous injured they are more likely to be injured in the future so take training as a journey and not try to speed through everything. Enjoy the process.