First some personal history. I have been a casual rock climber for a number of years. Being a self proclaimed student in the art of mastery, I know full well that dabbling in any sport is no way to progress. It was with pure serendipity that a number of events happened to allow me to not only put some old fashioned effort into training, but also gather some wisdom about taking care of your tools that I would like to share. As fate would have it, I had recently opened a CrossFit affiliate in a huge 5000sqft facility with 18ft ceilings (in 2009 when I opened, my gym would have been one of the largest in Canada). A few months...

Why is  RIPT Skin Systems' 3 phase hand care kit the best cream/hand balm on the market for CrossFit hand problems? Because there are 3 stages in which every CrossFitters hands exist at any given moment. 1)Pre-rip maintenance2) Post-rip repair3) Post-rip recovery You trim your nails and cut your hair don't you... Why aren't you taking care of your calluses? PRE-RIP Hand calluses are free gloves from nature. If you take just a little time out of your day to properly take care of them, they will protect you from rips, rather than be the cause of them. Shape and contour calluses to prevent rips. The number 1 biggest hand care mistake that newbs to CrossFit make is shaving, grinding,...

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.”

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...

What does your hand look like after swinging a kettlebell a few hundred times? Like this we bet.

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