When you regularly train on pull-up bars you will eventually get calluses on your hands. Sooner or later, but this just can’t be avoided. Unfortunately, not everybody knows that calluses should be treated carefully. That’s why they can bring some real troubles. Our goal is to give you the maximum of useful information, therefore today I’m going to speak how to get away from problems calluses or even how to get rid of them at all.
4 ways to fight calluses
1) The Grip. For gripping it’s better to use fingers instead of a palm. It’s just because rubbing of hand palms is the main cause of the calluses. No doubt this method demands more physical strength from the wrists, forearms and particularly fingers and it will be quite hard in the beginning, but it all will be well paid off in the end. Here is a picture for illustrative purposes:
2) Bar thickness. From school course of physics (yes, yes, this was a cool subject, wasn't it?) you might remember that pressure force is inversely proportional to the size of an area under the pressure. Thus, by increasing the area of contact of your hand and a bar, you will decrease the weight of the load on skin and reduce possibility of getting calluses.
This can be achieved in two ways (it's up to you to choose one)
- Find a thick bar and do the pull-ups on it
- Increase the thickness of a standard pull-up bar by using the special grips or plain towel (wrap it around a bar)
3) Gloves. Use the gloves that suit your training. In this aspect two variants may be highlighted:
* when hand rotates around the bar (e.g. during muscle ups),
* when bar is in a fixed position in your hand (e.g. during pull-ups or static exercises)
In first case you need gloves with a soft protection pad near the fingers and on the palm, because this pads protect your hands from getting the calluses. Also, your gloves shouldn’t have a high friction coefficient as we had already written about the consequences of friction force!
In second case you just need gloves that provide a good cohesion with bar, because this way you will reduce the load on your skin. As a radical alternative variant you can use special GRIPAD grips, which tightly fix your hand on a bar and have a few centimeters of protection surface that doesn’t allow calluses to appear.
4) Hand cream. Use lotion or cream (anyone is fine) to make your palms soft, as the dry skin more often chaps, cracks, tears and distracts you from training.
(Nivea cream is simply the first photo that came to my mind)
Well, that’s it. The main thought that I want you to understand is that although you can’t avoid getting the calluses, it doesn’t mean that you should suffer from them
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