What’s up, guys?
Sean Nalewanyj, www.SeanNal.com, in today’s video we’re talking about wrist pain on
the bench press.
It’s not the most exciting subject in the world but this is a pretty common nagging
injury that a lot of lifters end up with, especially as they progress to heavier and
heavier weights.
And it is something that I do get asked about regularly, so in this video today I’m going
to be giving you four quick tips that you can apply if this is something that’s been
bothering you.
And even if it isn’t a problem for you right now, these are some tips that you can use
to make sure that you’re benching with proper form so that doesn’t happen to you in the
future.
So, tip number one and probably the most important is to make sure that during the bench press
exercise your wrists are in a neutral position.
When a lot of people perform the bench press they end up bending the wrist backward like
this and not does that decrease the amount of weight you can lift but it also puts a
lot of stress on your wrist joints as well.
So when you do your bench presses make a conscious effort to keep your wrists straight and also
when you grip the bar, make sure to grip it along the lower medial portion of your hand
rather than gripping it higher up here like a lot of people do.
When you set the bar too high up that makes it a lot easier for you to lose neutral wrist
position.
The second tip is to adjust your grip width.
So, when you grip the bar too wide or too narrow your forearm and wrists can end up
bending excessively inward or outward, which also decrease your strength and it puts more
strain in your wrists as well.
Now, everybody has a different body structure with different lean lengths[?] so there isn’t
one absolute grip that’s going to apply to every single person but the bottom line
is to experiment and to find the grip width that causes your forearms to be vertical at
the very bottom of the exercise.
And you want your wrists and the elbows to be directly stacked on top of each other.
And if you really want to be sure about this then one thing you can do is to actually videotape
yourself to check your form and to make sure that everything is lined up properly.
So those are really the two main tips to get rid of bench press wrists pain and they both
revolved around keeping your wrists neutral.
Neutral from front to back by gripping the bar lower on your hands and neutral from side
to side by keeping your wrists and elbows vertically incline with each other throughout
lift.
You might need to slightly lower the amount of weight that you’re lifting while you
get used to this new gripping technique but you’re going to be far better off in the
long run if you go about it this way.
Now, aside from that if you’ve used both those tips and the pain still isn’t going
away overtime, another thing you could experiment with would be a pair of wrist wraps, which
are basically just pieces of cloth or leather that help to stabilize your wrist and keep
them straight.
Now, keep in mind that wrist wraps are not a substitute for proper bench pressing form
so even if they do take some of the pain away they aren’t going to treat the underlying
cause.
So I would say to only use wraps to give your wrists a chance to heal and to offer some
extra support while you work on your form and you work on fixing the underlying root
issue that’s causing the pain.
And the other thing to consider is actually just swap out the standard barbell bench press
altogether, at least temporarily, and focus exclusively on dumbbell presses as your free
weight horizontal pressing exercise.
Dumbbells overall are a more joint friendly exercise because your wrist can be angled
in to a more natural position rather than being locked into a fixed position on the
bar.
And you can even do them using a neutral grip with your palms facing in if your wrists pain
is especially bad.
Keep in mind from a pure muscle building stand point there’s actually no absolute necessity
for barbell presses in the first place.
And if your main goal is centered around hypertrophy, I would say that dumbbells are actually the
better choice anyway.
A dumbbell press lets you work your pecs through a larger range of motion because you can actually
bring your upper further across the front of your body, which is what the actual function
of the pecs are, and then because it’s an isolateral movement where each side of your
body lifts its own weight independently you’re able to train each side of the pecs equally
so that you don’t end up with any size or strength imbalance.
Not to mention that dumbbell presses are generally easies on the shoulder joints as well.
So if you want to do regular barbell bench press the that’s fine but if you aren’t
a competitive lifter and you’re getting a lot of wrist pain from it then it might
be a good idea, at least temporarily, to just take a break from the exercise altogether
and to put your focus on dumbbell presses and other chest movements instead.
Or just use a dumbbell press as your main movement and then do your barbell presses
afterwards when your strength is a bit lower so that you’re lifting a slightly lighter
weight.
So I hope those tips were helpful.
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Thanks for watching, guys.
And I’ll talk to you again soon.