No matter how committed you are to preventative hand care, if you enroll in a CrossFit competition where you have to do 50 pull-ups in the morning and 35 bar muscle up in the fourth workout of the day, your hands are going to suffer a serious beating.

This is exactly what happened to my teammate last weekend...

Let's be honest. 

Your grandfather didn't need gloves while he worked long hours in the field or factory doing manual labour that would crush even the toughest of the so called "athletes" of today.

His hands were made of hard earned leather. 

He didn't "workout", he worked. Period.

Many of us train for the coveted "work capacity", but who among us would have had the work ethic to stand among the giants that were our forefathers? 

Take Care of Your Thumbs!

That's the advice Rachel Siemens had to offer when we asked her how a CrossFit athlete turned Olympic weightlifter (who recently competed at her first international weightlifting competition in Russia) should take care of their hands. 

Although pull-ups and toes-to-bars are harder on her hands than Olympic weightlifting is, lifting barbells still causes her some problems from time to time.

“My hands are pretty much one giant callous. The boys love that, right?” she joked.

Sometimes her hands get specifically bad when she mixes it up and trains with the men’s bar. “I guess my callous build up specifically for the women’s bar and when I use the men’s bar, I expose a weak section of my thumb to the bar,” she explained.

Siemens admitted she doesn’t take care of her hands enough in terms of sanding them down with a pumice stone or a callous shaver; it’s her thumbs that cause her the biggest issues.

“When volume is high, I wrap athletic tape around my thumbs, and it helps for gripping the bar as well as protecting my skin.”

Ben Poss still remembers the horrors of his hands when he completed his Russian KB certification RKC (Russian Kettebell Challenge). It was a three-day course, meaning his hands didn’t get a break for three entire days.

One of the things he had to do on the first day was 100 KB snatches with a 24 kg KB in less than five minutes without putting the KB down.

“Those three days of high volume KB training was the most punishment my hand have ever suffered,” said Poss.

He added: “Both hands had torn calluses by the third day, and my hands were absolutely raw by the end of the graduation workout – The Deep Six.”

Here is a link to the workout if you would like to try it yourself: http://kbforum.dragondoor.com/kettlebells-strength-conditioning-forum/138876-rkc-deep-six.html

After years of experience, and tearing up his hands numerous times, Poss can be considered an expert in the field of hand care for kettlebell athletes. 

Donny Shankle is bigger than you, stronger than you, and knows more about hand care for weightlifters than you.  When your profession is lifting heavy objects over your head, taking care of your money makers is a must. If you can't hold the bar anymore, your training suffers.  In the following video, Shankle will walk you through how to properly take care of weightlifting hands, and which products he uses (can someone please get this man a RIPT kit?). Specifically a waxy hand balm (a la Quick Fix) rather than a hand cream, and a pumice stone to smooth down dead and dry calluses.  While Donny nails hand care on the head, the only point we would add is that...

Meet Kate Richardson:

Kate learned about hand rips at a young age. The two-time Canadian Olympic gymnast was already going through multiple rolls of athletic tape per week at the age of eight.

Although gymnasts wear grips when they perform on the bars, rips sometimes still happen, making bar routines painful, not to mention psychologically daunting....

That moment when you’re hanging onto a bar, oar, barbell, kettlebell, and you can feel the skin on your hands start to shift…

Although your shifting skin provides little physical evidence of any kind of blemish yet, you know you’re about to get a blister. And a rip.

Gymnasts, CrossFit athletes, rowers, rock climbers, among other “hand sport” athletes are all too familiar with this feeling.  It’s not the end of the world if the following day is your planned rest day, but if you’re in the middle of the Regional CrossFit competition, or sprint repeats in preparation for the Olympics, curse words start forming in your head, sometimes even bubbling out your mouth.

You need your hands to perform.

In the upcoming series of posts, we will explore the hand care needs of various elite level athletes in different sports, and demonstrate how RIPT Skin Systems' 3 Phase Reinforcement kit can help you keep your skin in the game...

At RIPT, we know a fews things about athletic hand care: If you're a high performance athlete, and your hands are involved in playing or practicing your sport, then ripped hands are like a flat tire. They limit your performance and your fun. RIPT will fix your hands. Fast. While we would love to be able to market RIPT Skin Systems to you with the use of scantily clad women, gritty, high production value video, and the promise that using our product will get you that fancy watch, performance sports car, and of course, the girl. But you’re smarter than that. So here are a few of our marketing mantras:  RIPT is a devilishly clever spelling error that works for...

This is the first look at the RIPT Refill Kit that is coming soon. Anyone who is part of our Early Warning mailing list will be getting the first heads up when the Refill Kit is ready to ship.