DON’T Believe The Hype: Tearing Your Hands Isn’t “Cool”

Okay, maybe the first time you might think you’re BADASS. After that, it’s just fuckin annoying.

But Before We Get To That…

On Wednesday, as I posted on Facebook and Twitter (LIKE and Follow me if you haven’t already), I managed to PR my back squat by 10# (back in December) with 315#. Initially, I was worried due to the heat and not having attempted a max back squat in months.

Luckily my spotter is the type of guy to hype me up every time we lift together. He just told me to go for it, even though I was sadly thinking of only 310# at the time.

I looked up at the clock. My rest time was over, so I did my typical cheesy “oh get a load of me” type of walk to the rack. Loaded the bar. Backed up a bit.

Once my feet were in place, I let my booty drop. Went slightly below parallel. Slowly I ascended.

Now it was the moment of truth. Would I be able to get that last quarter of the squat? Or would my buddy have to catch me?

I’ll be honest…the idea of failing a squat scares me to death even with a good spotter. It’s one of the reasons I never truly push my limits on this lift even though the squat was one of my first. That’s why I don’t just let anyone spot me.

Okay, so what happened?

I had a slight lean forward that last quarter of the way up. At this point, I was expecting some sort of struggle…but nope. Without any grunting or yelling, I PR’d 🙂

WTF Does This Have To Do With Tearing Your Hands?

So after the back squat, we had a 2 rep max thruster, which I PR’d too at 185#, and 20 sets of 5 pull ups for time…sounds, fucked up, huh?

After that HIGH of PR’ing two lifts in a row, it was such a BONER KILL tearing my hand up after 16 sets of 5. I only needed 4 more sets to finish. Around set 12 or 13, I was feeling the skin tearing a bit, but I was like “screw it.”

I went with the damn YOLO mentality…and of course, shit hits the fan whenever I think that way.

It’s been over a day since the tear, so it’s healed up a bit:

If you saw the tear when it was fresh though…mannnn. It looked like the Miami bath salt-consuming face eater took a chunk out of my finger. Not cool.

Lesson Of This Story?

Take care of your hands. Please.

Unfortunately, I thought of filing down my callouses as I got out of my driveway on Wednesday but didn’t feel like going back into the house and whatnot. Bad mistake.

When I’m not an idiot, I usually file down my callouses with a simple foot file (lolz…I know…but it works).

CrossFit Park City (Spealler‘s box) has some pretty solid hand care tips on their site as well.

If you do happen to make a bungle like me or just tear out of the blue, make sure you clean your shit. Wash your hands with warm soap and get any debris out of there. At home, use some small nail scissors or even a normal nail clipper to remove the hanging skin. Trying to bite (haha…) or rip it off yourself might make you bleed more.

Done that before. Not fun either.

Use some antibiotic and cover with a bandage after. Because I did this once I got home, within hours, the cut healed enough that it no longer stings when wet. Now I just have to bandage and tape that area for tomorrow’s 1 rep max deadlift. YEAHHHHH BUDDYYYYYY.

Alright…I need to get some work done on my other projects before I rest up for another testing day tomorrow.

Kip it real, my friends.