Tearing your hands during a workout can be a real bummer, especially when the rest of your body is good to go but you can’t even grab the bar anymore. Here are some tips to help avoid those dreaded tears:
1. Don’t use too much chalk: Chalk is an abrasive, which is the very reason it helps you to grip the bar. The more you put on the more abrasive it will be on your hands. Rather than putting on more and more chalk and ending up with a sweaty white grinding paste on your hands, towel your hands before you apply chalk to your hands, clap of the excess (into the bucket of course) and you’ll have better grip with less chance of tearing.
2. Re-adjust your grip: Next time you jump up onto the pull-up bar take a moment to re-adjust your grip to avoid having a fold of skin in your palm. This only takes a second and makes the contact area on the bar much bigger rather than focusing your entire bodyweight on a very small area of your palms.
3. Work on efficiency: A lot of torn hands come from excessive movement at the hands during exercises like pull-ups and toes to bar. If you watch someone who is good at these movements you’ll notice very little movement at their hands. If you’re working in building efficiency in these types of exercises, restrict the size of your sets to a point where your movement quality will not degrade to the point where you are flailing around under the bar like a fish out of water.
4. Be prepared: If you’re going to use tape, apply it properly. Don’t wait until your hands are a chalky, sweaty mess and then slap a whole roll of tape on them mid workout and expect it to do anything but annoy the shit out of you for the rest of the workout. There are various resourced on the net to show you how to do this.
5. Shave or pumice your callouses: If your callouses are like big dried out Corn Flakes then you’ll almost certainly tear. Get a piece of pumice stone or a callous shaver and rub down your callouses to keep them soft. Feel free to do this in the privacy of your own bathroom!
Enjoy.
