Handstands, planche, handstand push ups, one armed handstands - what do all of the above have in common? One thing they all have in common is that, after doing them - or perhaps even thinking about doing them - your wrists might hurt. Hand balancing, and lots of the calisthenics movements we talk about here, put a lot of pressure on the wrists. Because of that, our wrists are at risk (bit of a tongue twister for you) of injury. In this article I am going to go over my most helpful tips for mitigating our risk of wrist injury. I will go through specific stretches, exercises, and alternative training methods for reducing the load you put on your wrists. I will teach you how to prevent wrist injury as well as work with wrist injury.

Preventing Wrist Injury

1. Warm up

The boring old warm up. A crucial, yet often overlooked step, especially if you are keen on avoiding injury. It’s very important that you warm up your wrists before each workout, especially on days where you will be doing movements that are heavy on the wrists.I have a full warm-up follow along video that you can check out here if you like :)

2. Increase your wrists’ ROM and strength

One of the most important things in preventing wrist injury, intuitively, is to strengthen your wrists, and to increase your wrists’ range of motion/mobility.

Check it out for a few ideas on how to increase your wrist ROM

To do this, there are a number of wrist strength exercises and wrist mobility exercises you can do, some of which we will get into shortly.

You can use blocks or some other elevated surface to further increase your ROM.

3. Make the HS position a comfortable position and leave room for error

When you are in the handstand, your wrist and forearm are at a 90 degree angle to each other. Being at this 90 degree angle needs to be comfortable, and you need to allow a little room for error. Things happen when we are upside down. Say for example, your feet get too far ahead, you start falling forward, and you don’t wheel-out properly. This will put your wrists at even more of an angle. If you are already at your limit of mobility at 90 degrees, you could end up injuring your wrists. Having increased your room so you have a little room for error, though, can save you from this injury and having to take some time off training.

While in a handstand, our wrist/forearm angle is at 90 degrees. If this is your upper limit of mobility, and something happens, as in the second photo, you may injure your wrist.

4. Make it a habit to do wrist push ups (Make it hard and develop strength)

Never heard of wrist push ups before? They’re a game changer in preventing wrist injury. There are several different types of wrist push ups, and I’m going to talk about three in particular.

wtf are wrist push-ups? check it out to find out :)

These are:

1.First knuckle wrist flexions

2.Finger tip wrist flexions

3.Wrist Extension push ups

Do these three wrist exercises, and try to **improve** in each of them. Don’t just go through the motions!

All of these exercises can be made more difficult by adjusting the distance between your knees and your hands. As your knees get further away, more weight is placed on the wrists, and the exercise gets more difficult.

Your first goal will be to reach the point where you can do Wrist Extension Push Ups in a knee-supported position, with straight hips.

The eventual goal, however, is to do these exercises in a full push-up position.

Remember to make it hard! Develop your strength. You actually want to push it a little bit, and progress in these exercises, so your wrist strength actually improves and you are less and less at risk of injury.

One tip for doing these exercises is to use blocks. This will increase the ROM your wrists go through even more.

Go to the App Store/ Google Play to check out my app Berg Movement. Tons of programs, thousands of exercise, stepwise progressions, and more. Whether you are starting your calisthenics journey or are already advanced, there is a place for you to jump in and improve your game. Check it out :)

5. Try light PNF stretching - not too hard

PNF- short for Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation - is a form of stretching that involves both stretching and contracting the targeted muscle group. This is something you can try regarding your wrist mobility as well. Remember, with PNF, not to go too hard. Check this video out, at 2:45, to see how you can improve your wrist mobility using PNF.

Also, next time you’re at the bar and someone asks you that annoying question “So what do you do for a living?” you can mess with them and just say “Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation”. It will undoubtedly make you sound like a boss.

6. Listen to your body and give it time to adapt

Doing too much, too soon, is the fast route to injury with most high intensity exercise. If ever you start to feel even a hint of wrist pain lurking, step down the volume of your training and adjust your training accordingly.

7. Alternate between different grips to distribute the load on your wrists

One way to increase your training volume, while at the same time decreasing your risk of injury, is to use different types of equipment, as well as different grip variations.

Handstands need not only be done on the ground. You can also use parallettes, blocks, or a straight bar grip (using a pronated or a supinated grip). Whether you are working on handstands, the planche, or other wrist-heavy movements, switching between these grips and using these different pieces of equipment will allow you to train efficiently. It will also allow you to increase your training volume without having to worry about overuse injuries as much.

Using parallettes and blocks are a good way to switch things up.

The equipment I use is from Woodpower. If you’re interested in reading more about handstand equipment, I wrote a piece on it here, and if you’re interested in buying some, feel free to use my discount code :) . It’s also possible that you already have things around your home that you could use as a more affordable alternative to the equipment. If you’re handy, you could even try making some yourself.

If you’re feeling pain in your wrists, you can even try doing some movements on your fists, though it is quite difficult to do.

Training WITH wrist injury

8. If you are already experiencing wrist pain, change the grip you use/adjust the angle you put your wrist at, and avoid pain.

If you are already experiencing wrist pain, it may be possible to continue training without losing the progress you’ve already made. This can be done by putting your wrist at less steep of an angle.

One way to do this is to put the surface that you are practicing your handstands on at an angle. Woodpower, for example, has curved and slanted blocks that allow for this. But there are many other ways to slant the surface you’re doing handstands on. How? Prop whatever it is you are doing handstand on up on something, so that it is at an angle, like this.

Slanting your HS surface puts your wrists at less of an angle and may allow you to train through injury

9. Experiment ; try, fail, and succeed in finding what works best for you!

This one’s pretty self-explanatory. Mess around with different equipment; try out the different grips, and see how it feels for you. Most importantly, avoid pain, and don’t overdo it. If you are overdoing it, your body should tell you - listen to it!

Bonus tip number 10: Leaving a comment or sharing this post gets you easy karma :)

Quick re-cap!

“How can I prevent my wrists from getting injured when I handstand/hand balance”

Warm up
Increase your wrists’ ROM and strength
Do wrist push ups
Adjust the surface on which you are putting your hands to a less steep angle.
“But ummm, I can’t make the floor less steep :(”. Try to find a surface that’s angled, like a hill, or you can consider using equipment or some other flat, moveable object that you have lying around as your handstand surface. Examples of equipment are a handstand board, blocks, and parallettes.

I hope this article helped give you some insight as to how to prevent and/or work with wrist injury. If you’ve got any questions or something else to add, feel free to leave a comment and I will get back to it for sure! Take care movers! :)

PREVENTING Wrist Injury - Wrists of Steel in 9 steps