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Is it a sprain or worse? Go see a doctor if any of the following are being experienced

Jarlo, the physical therapist of GoldMedalBodies has written a helpful article on helping you understand if this is something you could manage on your own or see a doctor.

If you experience any of the following symptoms, go to a doctor:

numbness/tingling,

significant weakness not related to pain,

pain that wakes you up at night,

sharp, shooting pain that goes down your arms or legs,

any pain that doesn’t improve significantly within a week and pain of greater than 5 on a 1-10 scale.

Also, here is a “Wrist Pain Decision Guide” by the Harvard Medical Site. Answer the questions and it will help verify that you indeed, have a sprain, or something else.

Update: Harvard removed their wrist pain decision guide, but I found it here on web.archive.org. Hopefully that works.

If it is indeed a sprain, the prognosis is EXCELLENT if you allow your wrist to REST.

This is especially true for people who do not exercise or play sports that use the wrist. So listen, unless you’re getting paid big sums of money to be an athlete and you have to do it to support your family, then there is absolutely no reason to risk injuring your wrist again. You have all the time in the world to heal. If you are impatient and aggravate your condition again, you will delay the healing process even further.

Stretching is not the answer

If tendons or ligaments are damaged, stretching isn’t going to heal it. And to make matters worse, by stretching a joint, we risk sacrificing stability even further.

So nowadays, I only do extra wrist stretches as needed. Now, with that said, if you feel your wrists are genuinely tight, I really enjoyed this wrist warmup/stretching video and I have made a couple wrist stretching videos that you may enjoy. But don’t do these if your wrist is sprained at the moment as it will probably hurt!

The wrist is mostly just bones and connective tissue and it’s going to heal slower than muscle

Look at the arm in the middle below. Around the wrist, you see it’s white. That’s because there are no muscles there. The muscle bellies that control your wrist movements are found proximal to your wrist (closer to your elbow). Those muscles cross over the wrist joints and onto the hand through tendons and the wrist is full of an intricate array of ligaments. When you have a sprain in the wrist, it’s these ligaments and tendons that need healing, and their metabolic rate is 7-10x slower than muscle tissue due to their lack of vascularization (networks of blood vessels). What would take muscle tissue just one day to heal, would take connective tissue 7-10 days to heal. You cannot speed up this process through magic. This is why it is imperative you do not aggravate your condition further by “pushing through the pain” or anything silly like that. Heed the pain signals your body is giving you.

Don’t worry, your wrists will not only heal, but be stronger than before!



When I had sprained my wrist, I met another guy who had a sprained wrist as well, and I was like, “Oh man that sucks!” And he actually replied with, “No it doesn’t suck.” I was bewildered and I asked why. He said because he was now taking care of it, letting it heal and doing wrist exercises, and as a result of all this, it’s actually going to end up being stronger than it ever was before!

That got me looking up. And he was right, both our wrists are effin’ fine now. I was demoralized, depressed that I couldn’t workout and I was (irrationally) thinking I was screwed for life. He got me to realize that things were not only going to be all right, but better than all right. All it takes is patience and compliance with your rehab.

Drop the Ego and REST. You’re not going to lose your gains.



When I started to finally stick a handstand… I ended up trying handstands way too often without warming up and sprained my wrist. And then I started to cry inside thinking I was going to lose my [handstand] gains. I got antsy and wanted to train it so bad.

But then it hit me. It took me about ~6 months to be able to hold a handstand for just barely a few seconds. And most of that was not strength related but more-so about coordination, balance and understanding how to hold tension in the right spots. So, if I let my wrists heal completely, and I mean COMPLETELY, then I could probably continue where I left off pretty fast.

And besides, I hadn’t even practiced handstands for the first 29 years of my life. Why was I scared that I was going to fall apart into a skinny-fat individual from 3-4 weeks of off-time? This stuff sounds ridiculous when you think about how much the ego wants to show off. Tell it to shut up.

No more surfing. (An explosive push up? Basically asking for the wrist to hurt again!)

No more … you know what.

Don’t be depressed, you’re not going to be fucked for the rest of your life.

You’re not going to be crippled forever just cause of this sprain, so stop worrying about that. But what will make you lose a lot is if you become impatient, try working out before it’s healed, fuck your wrist up all over again, and then instead of waiting 2-4 weeks, you end up waiting months.

Take a strong mental note of what you did that caused your wrist to hurt so you don’t make the same mistake again.

For me, the first thing that caused a sprain was holding an L-sit on a 2″ slackline .

. The next time, it was from doing wrist-to-fist push ups. Ironically, this is an exercise that I was doing for strengthening my wrists. I had been doing them on my knees without any problems. I tried to do one rep in plank position just to see if I could and I hurt my wrist.

Ironically, this is an exercise that I was doing for strengthening my wrists. I had been doing them on my knees without any problems. I tried to do one rep in plank position just to see if I could and I hurt my wrist. After that was healed, I was starting to get better at handstands. Once I started to stick the freestanding version, I got hooked to trying handstands more often. And then my wrists started to feel great pain.

I am telling you these things because I don’t want you to make the same mistakes. I will stick to wrist-to-fist push ups on my knees for a very long time. I will never just jump into a handstand anymore without thoroughly warming up my wrists so they have better range of motion. If I didn’t take mental note of these things, I could very easily make the same mistakes again. (Our memory sucks!)

How long does it take to recover from a sprain?

Your recovery depends on the severity of your sprain and how good you are about not aggravating your condition further. I’ve had it range anywhere from 5 days to 4 weeks.

I remember the first time I sprained my wrist, it got 90% better after 2 weeks, but then I wasn’t patient enough to let it heal up completely, and I tried working out and messed it up and had to wait an extra 2-3 weeks all over again. So that sucked. I also was a total noob and didn’t know the things I know now, which is why this post is so lengthy.

Stop using your injured wrist for even the smallest things that hurt!

You may think that opening a door with your injured wrist may not be a big deal since it only hurts for just a fraction of a second, but all moments add up! Completely abstaining from using my wrist in even the tiniest ways was crucial to my recovery. For example: