Ever since our son was born 4 months ago my wife has had some serious wrist pain. It sounds exactly like DeQuervain’s tendonitis which seems to be extremely common. Applying everything you guys mention about tendonitis is a bit problematic here. She can’t just stop doing what is causing the pain, since it is literally just moving around and holding our son. Braces haven’t helped. Worse still, she is a dentist so she uses her hands all day with that. Basically she is ‘required’ to do alot of repetitive movements all day, which is the opposite of what she needs to do to help things heal.
Two bar question:
So how would you recommend someone deal with this issue overall?
She doesn’t want to do anything that hurts the wrist during a workout. But since it’s the wrist, thats basically everything! Luckily I have an SSB, so she has been using that for squats. I’m not sure what else she can do but SSB squats and things like abs. Any suggestions?
I had these exact same symptoms and it made training next to impossible. What I did was get the stiff wrist wraps and use those while pressing and that movement irritated me the most. I also spent a lot of time working on my technique so that I was not letting my wrist unnecessarily extend or flex. It definitely took 2+ months to go away, but I don’t notice the pain anymore…it regressed to the mean.
Thanks for inputting your experience. I have talked it over with her many times and she understands it’s a tendonitis issue that WILL go away eventually but will just take a long time like my tendonitis issues. So her very long term outlook is positive. But in the mean time (4 months now) it’s been killing her. Wrist wraps help for movements, but she feels like it is putting unneeded stress on them anyways so that’s not a workable solution right now unfortunately.
So I am trying to think of things I can have her do that don’t rely on any wrist involvement and its damn hard haha I should have mentioned we work out in a home gym, so no access to machines.
The other movement I thought of recently is the barbell glute bridges.
Honestly, every single time I would workout I would get pissed off and frustrated that the pain “never went away”. After a few months, I just stopped noticing it. During the time when it flared up, it would hurt ALL DAY. I couldn’t even press on something hard or turn a door knob without severe pain. I slept in a wrist brace to keep me from bending my wrist because even a slight bend would cause it to flare up at the base of my thumb.
I wish I had more practical advice/input, but truthfully I just kept trying to live my life and keep training and it just went away. No magic solutions or anything.