How to Fix "Weak" Wrists

People often ask me what to do about “weak” wrists. They usually complain of discomfort or even pain in the wrist area when supporting their body weight on their hands, such as during planks, push-ups, and gardening, and other similar palm-pushing activities. As a result, they shy away from those exercises and lose out on their benefits. While you can wear wrist supports or modify the techniques so that they put less strain on the joint, the best thing to do is to increase wrist flexibility and strengthen the muscles that support it.

While it may seem simple, the wrist joint is actually quite complicated. It consists of the 5 proximal ends of the metacarpal bones in the hand, 8 small bones in the base of the hand, the distal ends of the 2 long bones in the forearm, ligaments, and joints between all of the bones. As you can imagine, without strong support from the ligaments and muscles, it will be really hard to keep them moving appropriately relative to each other. When you have weak supporting muscles, bending the wrist and placing it under weight can easily move the bones out of alignment, making them hit each other and cause pain. Similarly, if your wrist isn’t flexible enough, the bones will be crushed against each other when placed in stressed positions.

Before we go over how to strengthen these important muscles, let’s cover the correct way to push with your wrists extended, such as in a push-up. Contrary to common practice, the hand and wrist should not be relaxed when pushing with your palm. Doing so will allow weight to move your wrist bones out of alignment. It will also concentrate the stress onto fewer joints, increasing the chances of injuring them. Rather, constantly press and flex the entire hand into the ground, distributing the force throughout the palm, bases of the fingers, and the finger tips. This engages your wrist and finger flexor muscles, stabilizing the wrist joint.

Left: Pushing down with only the base of the palm provides less stability and concentrates stress into a smaller area.
Right: Pushing down with all parts of the hand and fingers increase stability and better distributes the stress. Note the pressure from the fingers indenting the carpet.

This technique also improves the stability of your support. Maintaining tension throughout your hand enables you to sense changes and react quickly. This is something I struggled with for a long time when learning the handstand. I used to do them with my hands relaxed, which made it difficult to adjust my balance. In addition, the weight of my body quickly made my wrists hurt. Once I tightened my hand and fingers, improvement quickly followed and the pain went away.

Now that you know how to properly push with your palms, you can start strengthening your wrists. It’s as simple as using the proper pushing technique whenever you do planks, push-ups, sit presses, or any other pushing exercises. There's no need to do separate wrist curls with weights. If your wrists are too weak to support that much body weight right now, try doing easier versions of those exercises. For example, you can do push-ups or planks against the wall. Move your legs back and your hands down the wall until you feel enough pressure on your wrists. As you get stronger, you’ll be able to move your hands further down the wall. Alternatively, you can rest your knees on the ground to reduce weight. As your wrists gain strength, move your knees back to increase the difficulty.

Don’t forget to stretch your wrists regularly throughout the day. Use one hand to bend the other wrist in all different directions, to the point of tension but not pain. With consistent effort, you’ll notice an increased range of motion and wrist stability. Before long, your “weak” wrists will be a thing of the past.

Why Pull-Ups Shouldn’t Stop at Your Chin

I remember first learning about pull-ups during the physical fitness tests back in grade school. A repetition only counted if your chin went above the bar so there was lot of neck craning and leg kicking during those gym class pull-ups. When scrawny kids are only trying to beat their friends, they don’t care about form or the benefits of exercise.

As adults, pull-ups are no longer a mandatory activity (unless you’re in the military), and are a great way to build strength and functionality. Despite the change in goals, we often stick to doing them the way we first learned them, stopping with the chin just above the bar. While still effective, I would argue that this isn’t the most effective use of your time and effort.

Instead of artificially stopping with the chin just above bar-level, why not keep going? A chin-level pull-up is actually less than half of the range of motion that our arms are capable of. You can actually keep pulling higher until your lower chest is at bar-level. As you can imagine, this is even more difficult, which means a better workout for your muscles, and more bang for your workout time.

But it doesn’t stop there. If you keep going up, the movement transitions from mostly pulling to a pushing movement. That means you can work on even more muscle groups with the same exercise! At the very top, you’ll be supporting your body weight on the bar with your arms straight down, just like the top of a dip. This combined pull-push movement is called a muscle-up. When done in a controlled manner (little swinging or momentum), you can develop great strength throughout the entire range of motion with this exercise alone.

I emphasize the importance of relying on momentum as little as possible since that works your target muscles maximally and imparts the most strength building benefit. Just as in grade school, going quickly, kicking, or kipping like you often see in CrossFit may help you notch a couple more reps but that doesn’t maximize the strength-building benefits for your time spent.

Besides looking cool and being more time efficient, muscle-up training imparts more functionality. Training this combined pull-push movement erases the strength gap that most people have when they are transitioning between pulling and pushing. This means better performance for many sports. For those of you who like more extreme sports, it’s also quite handy if you ever find yourself hanging off a building or cliff and need to climb up.

So, the next time you do pull-ups, don’t stop at the chin. Keep going up as high as you can. You may not be able to do as many repetitions this way but you’ll gain more benefit in less workout time.

For the best muscle-up I've seen to date, check out the video of Olympic gymnast Andreas Aguilar below. The applause is definitely well-deserved!

 

Building Strength - The First Step to Staying Active and Healthy

Here's an article I wrote for the November 22, 2014 issue of The Sounds, a local Chicago newspaper.

In my last article, I mentioned several different aspects of fitness. While they are all important, some are more essential than others these days. As a doctor, the most common fitness deficiency I have observed is inadequate and/or unbalanced strength. I see this across the board in people of all ages. Younger people commonly develop chronic back and joint pain from poor posture or injuries. Many older people live a lower quality of life due to their inability to move around safely and independently. Unfortunately, many end up in the hospital after falling and sustaining life-threatening injuries.

Why is strength so important? Strength is the foundation of all movement, and movement is essential to health. The less strength you have, the harder it is to move around, which makes you less inclined to be active. As a result, your muscles become even weaker. This vicious cycle continues and before you know it, you are out-of-shape and suffering from various pains and health conditions.

Being strong isn’t about being bigger, looking ripped, or being able to lift heavy weights. It’s about making activities easier for yourself so that you don’t strain your body as much. This includes your heart and muscles as well as joints, ligaments and tendons. Strong, balanced muscles can help improve body posture, decrease the risk of injury, and reduce or even eliminate certain kinds of back and joint pain.

Fortunately, strength can be the easiest and least time-consuming aspect of fitness to build. Contrary to common belief, building strength doesn’t require going to the gym and lifting weights for hours. When your muscles are exposed to loads greater than they are accustomed to, even for short periods of time, they respond by growing stronger. This response occurs whether the load is from gym weights, heavy bags of groceries, or just your own body weight. In fact, you can build significant strength by training appropriately in as little as one minute a day, without any special equipment.

Try the following exercise from my One Minute Workout. Using a stable chair, hold the “Tuck Sit Press” position shown below for as long as you can. Do your best to lift your feet off the ground. If you can’t, then let your feet touch the ground lightly but minimize the amount of weight placed on them. This is called a “Rising Chair Press”.

Count or use a clock to time yourself. Stop when you get tired or when 60 seconds is up, whichever comes first. You should feel the muscles in your arms, chest, upper back, abs, and hip flexors strongly engaged during this exercise.

Tuck Sit Press

Tip: If you have a chair with solid armrests, it may be easier to use those as supports. You can also use two chairs placed shoulder-width apart, putting one hand on each chair seat.

Whether you finished a whole minute or not, chances are your abs started burning or your arms started shaking while doing the above exercise. That’s proof that your muscles were getting an intense workout. In just those few seconds, you blasted your chest, shoulders, arms, back, abs and hip flexors simultaneously. That’s almost your whole body! This is an example of how you can build significant strength without spending much time.

To maximize results, finish your One Minute Workout for the day by repeating this exercise throughout the day until you accumulate a total of 60 seconds. Do this exercise daily, push yourself a little longer each time, and you’ll grow stronger and feel better.

"The One Minute Workout" Book is Officially Launched!

It’s taken over 4 years of hard work but the book is finally out! You can find it at Amazon (http://amzn.to/1nfv1cg) and soon, at a bookstore near you. Thanks to everybody who helped and supported me so far with this project. I couldn’t have done it without you.

You can find out more about how and why the One Minute Workout works from the main website (http://oneminworkout.com) so I won’t go over that again here. Instead, I’d like to say a few words about what I hope to accomplish with this project.

As a doctor, I’ve seen many people suffer the consequences of being overweight and overly inactive. They get diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, addiction to pain killer medications, you name it. The sad thing is all of those things are largely preventable. Some are even reversible! We all know exercise is the answer but for some reason, it’s so much easier said than done. Healthcare professionals try to counsel their patients about diet and exercise but the results are not very encouraging.

I’ve thought about this for a long time and it wasn’t until I personally became out of shape and overweight when I realized what the problem was. Movement is essential to health and strength is the foundation of all movement. Therefore, we should be focusing first on strength!

We doctors usually counsel our patients about doing “cardio” activities to improve and maintain health. Recommendations often include walking, biking, running and swimming. But when you’re out of shape, your muscles are weak so moving is really hard work! It’s no wonder people rarely stick with our exercise recommendations. Plus, these “cardio” activities takes a lot of time, which many of us don’t have to spare these days. Now, some physicians do recommend some form of strength training but just telling people to start lifting weights isn’t very effective. They need regular guidance or a plan to follow so they get the results they need.

This epiphany led me to create the One Minute Workout. Sure enough, after I started using this convenient workout system and building strength, I started moving much more easily. As a result of moving better, I felt better, and I started looking better as well. With some adjustments in my eating habits to match my activity level, I lost the extra fat weight and gained significant lean muscle mass. Now I’m in the best shape of my life and am much stronger than when I used to lift weights at the gym regularly.

With inactivity and obesity rates increasing worldwide, this workout system addresses a fundamental part of the puzzle that is often overlooked by healthcare providers. It has already helped many people and I’m hoping it will help even more now that it’s available in book form.

We all know someone we care about who can benefit from exercise. Please share this with your friends and family - together we can beat this epidemic!