Somehow as a community, we’ve adopted the belief that if you rip your hands, you’re a wimp if you don’t work through the carnage and finish the workout—even if you’ve lost multiple layers of skin and are bleeding through your tape. A belief that people will somehow be impressed by a picture of ruined hands uploaded to Instagram. #100-pull-ups=destroyed-hands. 

Despite a deeply-entrenched fear of looking soft, many of the top CrossFit athletes in the world don’t live by these standards. They don't think letting your hands rip recklessly makes them tough. They don't think training is the time to rip at all. And if they do rip, working through the pain and creating deeper rips on rips is just silly.

When a person experiences his inaugural rip, he or she comes running to me legitimately confused what to do next. 

“Should I pop the blood blister?”

“Should I cut the skin off?”

“Should I cover up the rip, or let it dry out?”

Although the answers to these questions are like diet advice—all over the map—as someone who has been doing hand sports my whole life, here’s my best advice:

Being a Cirque du Soleil performer means Laura-Ann Chong's schedule includes 10 performances, and two or three training sessions, each week. A day rarely goes by where she doesn’t spend hours a day swinging, releasing, pirouetting around the bars. Her hands take a constant beating.

While acute rips are inevitable, Chong took the time to share her secrets to avoid too many unwanted rips, cracks, and hand pain.

"CrossFit is torture." We’ve all heard that before.

And I couldn’t agree more with that statement. 

My understanding of why torture works is that it makes a person so uncomfortable—puts them in so much physical pain—that they snap mentally and end up doing things like revealing information they would never otherwise never reveal. When this happens, the torturer wins.

My hands are susceptible to ripping. Or maybe it's that my 165 lb. bodyweight makes me have to grip harder, kip harder, and rip harder. Two years ago, my hands would have been an utter MESS after 15.1!

With the Open one week away, people everywhere are making predictions. Will this be the year of the bar muscle-up? The handstand push-up? The pistol? Will it be heavier than normal? The amount of time we waste thinking about it is actually insane because the truth is nobody knows exactly what Dave Castro will throw our way.  But despite the unknown surprises that are sure to come, there are a couple things I’d put money on: 1. Chest-to-bar pull-ups in high dosage 2. Considering how competitive this year will be with only 20 regionals berths on the line, repeating workouts will be more likely than ever this year Combine both of these theories, and this means hands must be ready...