What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM.
Do you get wrist pain when you do Barbell Curls?
Not necessarily dumbbells, but wrist pain when you do Barbell Curls?
If you do, I think I can help you especially if you're getting pain on the inside near
the pinkie right here at the base of the wrist when you're curling.
See we have to look at what's going on to understand why that might be happening, and
then I'm going to show you something you might be able to do to help alleviate that.
When we curl, the problem is, we're basically curling with a fixed bar, obviously, if we're
using a straight bar.
And this fixed bar forces our hands into a degree of supination that we may not be either
able to achieve or comfortable with because
in order to get to a straight bar, we have to really get our supination all the way up
until it's flat enough to be able to support a bar.
When we use dumbbells, we can kind of cheat that a little bit and have our hands even
just a little bit more pronated, k, this direction, so that when we curl,
we don't have to feel that extreme range of motion.
Well, what happens there is, if you take a closer look, the extensor carpi ulnaris is
a muscle that runs on the backside of our forearm
and runs through the wrist and attaches to our fifth metacarpal, or our little pinkie
bone here.
When we pronate our forearm here, it has a nice straight path from here straight through.
It gets to run with little tension and torque straight up to its destination right up here,
again, on the base of that metacarpal.
If we supinate the wrist, though, as we would with a Barbell Curl, now all of a sudden,
and I have to actually turn because I can't get there comfortably, and you can see the
difference
how difficult it is to get a lot of supination there, we now have changed the path of that
tendon.
You can see that now it doesn't go straight.
Now it kind of angles off at a 30 degree angle.
What's happening there is, now we're creating torque, and once we have a torqued tendon,
you're going to go add tension to it with the bar, and over time if you start curling
like that and you don't have adequate flexibility and mobility in that tendon, you're going
to have problems.
So, what can we do about it?
You can try to increase your own supination mobility at your wrist.
And what you do is, you want to start by putting your elbow in at 90 degrees,
and I'll tell you why in one second, and you grab the area, the meaty area of your wrist
below your hand.
You don't want to grab your hand because it's possible to torque and twist your hand
without ever really influencing the true supination at the forearm.
So, you grab the meaty area of the wrist here when you're in this 90 degree position, and
you're just turning
and you try to stretch it for about 20 to 30 seconds.
You let it go, grab for a little bit more range if you have it, and you turn again.
20 or 30 seconds.
Let it rest, and then do it again if you can grab a little bit more available range.
You could even do a little bit of contract/relax where once you're in this end position,
you try to pull your hand back against the resistance for about 5 seconds, and then let
it go.
And you might find that you can get even a little bit more motion.
The next thing you want to do is make sure that you're not also exacerbating this problem
by consciously trying to involve your forearms in your curl.
We've talked about that before.
It can cause a lot of problems even at the inside part of your elbow if, when you're
curling, you're really trying to use your forearms to help cheat the weight up.
The best way to do that is to try to allow your wrists to bend back a little bit.
Bend into a little bit of extension so that when you're doing the curling, you're not
over-using the forearm
because another way to make this problem worse in your wrist here is to combine a little
bit of this wrist flexion with the torque here at the wrist from the supination and
also,
what they call ulnar deviation, getting your hand bent in this direction.
So, you get that combination of 3, and the position that we're referring to is when you're
carrying a football.
And they sort of diagnose this in PT clinics.
If you carry the football position here, which is wrist flexion, ulnar deviation, forearm
supination and elbow flexion, and if you start feeling some
discomfort and pain in here, it's very likely that you've got this going on.
Obviously, if you're doing Curls and you're feeling a lot of pain there, likely you've
got this going on.
So, make those 2 modifications.
Try to get into a little bit of extension on your Curls, and also, like I've said, try
to work a little bit on the mobility of your supination in your forearm.
It could go a long way.
Now, obviously, if it's burning and killing you right now, you might want to lay off of
the straight bar Curls, and go to something more neutral,
like a Hammer Curl for now until that pain starts to subside and then as you get back
into it you can start using some of these mobility drills and then progressively try
to get back up to the bar.
Guys, we put the science back in strength here at ATHLEANX.
As a Physical Therapist, it's impossible for me to look at a workout or look at an exercise
without realizing
what's the overall effect on you as a whole?
Because if you can't get to the gym, if you can't curl a straight bar, I think it's a
great exercise.
I think it's one of the best ways to build your biceps and probably one of the biggest
ways that I relied on to build my biceps as I developed,
if you can't do it because you're in pain, then what good is it?
You've got to make sure that we're doing things the right way.
And the ATHLEANX Training Program, guys, again as a Physical Therapist, I put everything
in there and I progress you the way I feel you should to make sure that
we're addressing everything not just saying, 'Hey go do these exercises.
These are good.'
No.
Sometimes you have to look a little bit deeper than that, and that's what I try to do.
If you found this video helpful, make sure you leave a thumb's up and a comment below.
I got this idea because
one of you out there requested, 'What do you do for wrist pain during Barbell Curls?'
So, whatever else it is that you want to see, make sure you leave your comments and it might
show up here in a future video.
In the meantime, I'll see you over at ATHLEANX.COM.
And I'll be back here in just a couple days.