One of the chronic injuries I battled with for a long time was my right wrist. I hurt it back in high school playing football and it was never the same afterwards.
This made a lot of what I do really hard.
Try doing handstands when its painful to bend your wrist back. Try doing them when you can’t even get one to 90 degrees.
I tried. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes it was better and sometimes it was worse, but it actually laid me off on hand balancing completely for a long time.
Here’s a picture I took for one of my books. You can see me leaning to the side, with one elbow bent because the wrist couldn’t handle the pressure.
As you can imagine, this caused a chain reaction of compensations in my body, that still exist to some degree today.
At one point I got fed up with it all. I made the decision that I would do EVERYTHING in my power to fix my problem.
And I did!
Through a series of physical drills, topical treatment and taking care of the mental/emotional trauma I no longer had any pain.
And that was wonderful.
It’s still never been as flexible as my left wrist. (Maybe that’s cause I always do these drills on both sides, even though only one side was injured, so I was improving the left‘s flexibility too.) But the pain is 100% gone and has been for years.
Well, recently when I got back into hand balancing I realized I had let things slide back to some degree. Still no pain, but I knew I’d have to work on the flexibility so I could move forward in my skill training.
And that’s what I did.
Lots of different drills which I cover fully in Indestructible Fingers, Wrists and Elbows.
One thing I found, a principle of indestructibility, is that the further you go in one direction, the more it tends to open up the other.
With most handstands you’re in fairly extreme wrist extension.
That means to balance it out I needed to train wrist flexion.
I did lots of that. In fact, I set out a goal, that I’ve never actually seen another person do.
I wasn’t even sure if it would be possible for me. But I worked with proper progressions (something most rehab work misses entirely) and kept at it.
And when I finally pulled it off, it was easier than expected!
I’m talking about the back of wrist handstand pushups.
One thing to realize is that healing isn’t an all or nothing thing. Its almost always an ongoing process.
Due to the original injury and re-hurting it several times, and the chronic issues that existed for years, it may never work quite like the other one.
But as long as I take the proper action, with Indestructible Fingers, Wrists and Elbows exercises that I’ve compiled and came up with myself, it won‘t hold me back.
And I’m happy with that result.
So I have a question for you…
Are you being held back by a chronic injury?
If it has to do with the fingers, wrists or elbows go here now and get this book!
If it is somewhere else in the body, the new book covers it as well.
Comments
Great post Logan! It’s funny you mention this because I am recovering from straining my right wrist attempting wrench bending/breaking. I have come to realize that stretching and massaging has been really helpful and just giving it time to recover. Those techniques you have pictured are the same techniques I have used (only I have not attempted Handstands on the back of them; LOL).
Thanks for the information, it brings great confirmation!
God Bless,
Greg
Dude,
I love your posts and I just bought your book on squats. I was actually gonna email you to talk about my shoulder. I learned handstands from you and I’ve really been taking them to another level, when my shoulder cooperates.
I originally began having problems bc of baseball. I actually broke cartilage in my chest swinging a bat. I resumed throwing way too early and developed some bad mechanics to go along with highly developed arm strength on a wiry frame (90 mph fastball at 175 lbs at 17 years old). This caused immediate elbow pain and I pushed through it and began muscling the ball. The elbow pain led to shoulder issues with my continued throwing. The elbow pain was resolved, but the shoulder has suffered ever since I tried to hit 90 mph on the jugs about two years after my final game. Years of heavy benching probably didn’t help and I also had a wreck in Baghdad where I wrapped it around my body.
I had several cortisone shots and it was MRId about 8 months after the shots. The ortho believed there was a labrum issue. I never acted on it, but had it MRI’d again two years ago and the doctor said there was nothing. It’s been driving me nuts lately and keeping me from handstands and juggling at times. I also CANNOT throw a baseball overhand without serious pain, at any speed.
My current doctor suggests the injury healed itself improperly in the space either before or between the MRIs and that is why I can do a lot of things except throw. I can pop it at will by simply pulling the back/bottom of the joint up and over to the front(the sound will make you cringe). I’m going back to my doctor on Friday and I feel I’m ready to put this pain (and the heavy lifting/ max throwing) behind me and focus on juggling, body weight training, and tossing batting practice to the team I coach.
That wrist handstand pushup gets me everytime! I myself suffered an injury to my right wrist when I was 14, which made a lot of gymnastic type movements difficult, especially training a handstand. Weight lifting with different lifts helped reduce my overall wrist damage to an extent, but most biggest improvement came from doing wrist pushups. A mix of isotonic and isometric wrist pushups helped my wrist develop more strength than it had before the injury, and it is also pain free.