Unfortunately for us, stupid CrossFitters around the world have given us a bad reputation. Athletes who purposely push too far in a workout, rip the bejeesus out of their hands and then post the pictures of their bloody stumps on facebook have made our community and our sport look like a bunch of assholes. While the hamburger hands crowd think their friends will be impressed at how "totally HARDCORE!" they are, the rest of the world looks at that and thinks "you, my friend, are an idiot". It is exactly the same thing as if you did too many deadlifts with too much weight and then tweeted a picture of yourself unable to stand up straight like it's some sort of a badge of honor.
"Sometime the eliteness just leaks right out of me"
We've all ripped our hands at some point and maybe even some of us posted that mess on Facebook, but lets learn from our mistakes. File that in your shame cabinet along with that time you wore hammer pants, any time the words "lets do tequilla shots" have come out of your mouth, and anything involving "back combing". Ripped up hands are an injury and injuries are not cool, especially ones that are 100% within your control to prevent. Injuries take time to heal and that time takes you away from your regular training. No sport is completely safe, it's true. At some point something will happen, but lets keep the risk of injury to the bare minimum, purely accidental kind of injuries. The 'oops I dropped that plate on my toe' kind of boo boo, or the 'shit I pinched my finger between the bar and the rack' kind of buffoonery. It is your job to take care of all the variables you can control to keep yourself in tip top shape for unhindered training whenever possible. Open wounds on your hands are particularily nasty because now you've opened the door (literally!) to every bacteria and virus your hands come in contact with on that handrail, that bathroom door, that shopping cart, that... eww eww eww. Can we stop now? Have I made my point?
Don't join the open wound club! By properly maintaining your hands, working on your form, and making good decisions you can avoid ever having to politely decline a handshake and create another awkward social situation. Speaking from experience, I haven't ripped my hands in over a year and a half since I figured out the 6 points below...
1) Chalk
A little bit of chalk is your friend. It absorbs the sweat and keeps you from sliding off the pullup bar into an epic tailbone dismount. But too much chalk just creates extra friction - that unwanted skin-rubby-offy kind of friction. Chalk your palms lightly once in a while, or better yet chalk the bar once before the workout starts, and then stay away! Wandering over to the chalk bucket is usually an excuse to take a break anyway, but that's a point for another rant...
Moar chalk! MOAR!
2) Wash Up
As soon as you're finished the WOD, wash your hands. The point of the chalk is to absorb the moisture off your hands. Leave it on their too long and it soaks up all the oil out of your skin, making your hands dry, flaky, and more susceptible to cracking and tearing. Also, who knows what kind of new microorganisms we are breeding in those chalk buckets, so this is probably a good idea based on the germ factor alone.
3) Lube Up
It's winter, it's Saskatchewan, it's dry. Keep those hands moisturized as often as you can. My personal favorite is to apply a heavy salve (sort of a vaseline consistency) to my callouses right before bed and let it soak it while I sleep.
4) And now for the gross part
Once you have some callousses built up you can do a little happy dance because now you are elite. But then you can make an eww face, because now it's time to do something about them. Big thick deep callousses get ripped off in big thick deep tears. You gotta trim that shit down! If you've been in the gym long enough, you've probably seen someone take a box cutter directly to their hands and shave off the top layer of dead skin. I take 5 minutes and do this before any workout with bar stuff. Should that be a little too hardcore, you can also file those babies down with an emory board or have at them with a callous shaver (find one at any store in with the nail clippers and such). Don't try to use a dremmel tool with a sandpaper attachment. That particular bit of advice comes from experience.
callous shavings are the new lemon zest
5) Get Tight
And now for the part where we talk about better movement. If your "kipping" has you slip sliding all over the bar, then your movement is probably less kipping and more wild, poorly controlled flailing. With good, tight movement based on a gymnastics-style long body position your hands will be locked on to the bar and won't create any of that nasty friction.
6) Make Good Choices
I have a cousin that likes to conclude her visits not with the typical "take care", but instead by reminding everyone to "make good choices". What great advice! If you can feel that you are close to sacrificing a layer of skin to the pull up gods, then for goodness sakes please STOP. This is the same rule that applies to any situation where you can sense that you are close to hurting yourself. Those last few reps you might hack out are not worth being unable to hang on a bar, lift a barbell, or swing a kettlebell for the next week. Pushing yourself to the point of injury only holds back your training and doesn't prove anything (except maybe what poor judgement you have).
And now for the one caveat... Sometimes in a competition setting, where something might actually be at stake you will take risks you wouldn`t normally take or push harder than your better judgement tells you you should. This is gaming. What we do day in and day out in the gym is training. It`s different. If a few extra toes to bar with a shredded mitt are between you and a spot in the CrossFit Games, then by all means bleed away. But save these moments for when you really need them. A random Wednesday doing a workout you'll forget about in two weeks is no time to be pulling out all the stops. Quit before you rip so you can come back tomorrow.
mmm k?