Hi Drs!
Thank you very much for answering questions on the forum. I wanted to ask the following questions:
Is increasing wrist strength helpful to reduce injury risk for striking sports e.g. heavy bag work/boxing?
And are knuckle pushups a sensible way to strengthen the relevant muscles?
are knuckle pushups on a hard surface safe for the joints? (provided you increase intensity/volume slowly, etc)
Thank you very much in advance
Mike
Mike,
Thanks for the post. To your questions:
I think that increased conditioning of the wrist and upper extremity via graded exposure to sports-specific tasks and training of the musculoskeletal system is likely to reduce injury risk. Heavy bag work and boxing would be sports specific training for a combat sport athlete for example, whereas using a wrist roller, captains of crush, and other training of the wrist, hands, and forearms would be more general. While I think training is likely beneficial from an injury risk reduction standpoint, I can’t say by how much and I’m not super confident that hand/wrist injury rates would change a ton.
I think they would be useful for static strength of the wrists, though more dynamic exercises would ideally be included to improve multiple functions of the wrists and hands.
In general, yes.
Thank you very much for the reply. A short follow up:
would your recommodations change for injury prevention gor board breaking as practiced in karate, other traditional martial arts?
would you say, strengthing bones/connective tissue for punching is an important consideration with regard to knuckle push ups?
All the best