Reducing Wrist Pain with Push-ups: Part 1

Spending a lot of time in the push-up or high plank position can lead to our wrists feeling sore and tired. Some people are more prone to this than others and might not be able to stand doing push-ups or plank exercises at all.
The wrist is made of several small bones connected by tendons and ligaments, which is what gives our wrists a wide range of motion.

I’m going to show you three ways to help alleviate some of the wrist soreness caused by doing push-ups.

I want to start with fixing any technique issues with the push-up, as poor push-up form can cause stiffness and pain in our wrists.

1. ​Make sure your hands are completely flat on the ground. If your hands are cupped slightly, you’re putting more pressure on your wrists.
2. Keep your wrists in line with your shoulders. Having a hand placement that’s too wide, will put stress on both the wrist and the shoulders. We all have a tendency to do push-ups with a little bit wider hand placement because it makes the move that much easier, but it comes at a cost! Wide grip push-ups are actually an advanced push-up variation because it takes more control to maintain proper form.
3. Aiming for a straight line between your wrist and your shoulder also means front to back. Having your hands too far in front or behind your shoulder line will put more pressure on your wrists.
4. Distribute your weight to the outer parts of your hand. We tend to put weight in the center of our hand and on the pad of our forefinger because it’s strong. But redistributing the weight to the outside of our palm and toward our finger tips will use more grip strength and take pressure off our wrists.
5. Keep your elbows tucked into your torso. Proper hand placement helps this issue, but it’s important to keep our elbows at about 45º to our body to reduce strain on our shoulders and wrists. Distributing our weight will help with this too.
   When our elbows flare out it means we lack torque in our shoulder joint, to fix this, imagine screwing your hands into the ground, which will engage the rotational force of your shoulders.
6. Engage your whole body! Push-ups are full body exercises and require a whole body tightening to maintain good form. If your lower back is sagging or poking up in the air, you’re adding stress to your wrists. Brace you core and breathe through your abdomen while performing push-ups to keep your body moving as a single unit.

Next, let’s move into ways to modify push-ups to relieve some pressure from the wrists.
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Do Inclines: Incline push-ups are great for beginners to learn the mechanics of a push-up and gain upper body strength, but they’re also friendlier on our wrists. Elevating our upper body reduces the angle of our wrists relative to our forearms, reducing the stress placed on them.
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Use dumbbells: Holding on to dumbbells for push-ups drastically reduces the wrist angle, taking the majority of the pressure off the wrists. Hex dumbbells are best for this because of the flat surface they provide.
Dumbbells elevate our point of contact with the ground, be aware of your body position, if you’re not ready for deficit push-ups!
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Knuckle down: Another option is to roll up on to your fist with your knuckles on the ground. This creates a near vertical with the wrist and forearm, taking pressure off the wrists. However, this variation can fatigue the forearms faster and applies downward compression on the wrists, so this isn’t a good option for those with specific wrist injuries.

Part 2 of this can be found on my website, it includes Strengthening and Stretching exercises for the wrists and forearms — read it HERE!