Maintaining healthy hands with CrossFit. Let’s talk about hand care.
What are calluses?
All calluses are caused by repetitive movements that produce friction on your skin. Over time, the dead skin cells build up and harden over your new ones as a defense mechanism to protect the skin underneath the callus.
Gym hands:
Calluses that happen from gripping and lifting weights without gloves are sometimes called gym hands. These calluses are typically found on the ridge of skin on your palms right underneath your fingers, where the friction from repeatedly gripping a weight would occur.
Now that we understand that calluses are dead skin cells, what do we do?
We shave them down. This can be done using a pumice stone, for a more gentle touch. But using a pumice stone will require more frequent uses. You can also remove calluses using a single blade razor. Which can require some skill to ensure you are only shaving off dead skin. Amazon has great options but this one is definitely a must have “Hand Callus Remover, Palm Finger Thumb Callus Shaver Titania with 10 Blades for Removing Hard, Cracked, Dry Skin https://a.co/d/dQp9cQh”
Why remove them?
The larger our calluses get, the more dead skin build up there is. When there is an excess of dead skin it is more likely for the callus to get caught and rip off. Unfortunately this does not just rip off dead skin but healthy skin cells as well, causing bad rips that can cause us to miss workouts and be in pain.
By shaving down our calluses regularly we can prevent rips from happening more frequently and severely and keep our hands healthy for a more consistent workout schedule. Happy shaving!!
