T Nation

Can't Do Any Pressing

Bodybuilding
#1

so I suffered a serious wrist sprain with ligament damage (no tears) to my extensors on my left hand by elbowing myself falling backwards from a botched full clean.

i basically cant press, my chiro says not to do anything that causes acute pain but i can train through it. anything in a pushup position hurts, anything wide grip hurts, reverse curls out of the question.

i can do narrow grip pressing at medium weight, nothing heavy, i can do militaries at medium weight but really cant go hard. and i can do straight bar curls once again, medium weight. i can’t push myself on any of these things

pulling is no problem, in fact i can go all out on deads, rows, and chins. hammer curls okay, rope press downs okay. even lateral flyes are kinda okay.

what should i do. at the moment my back and legs are starting ot simply dominate. I really need some exercises that wont hurt my wrist but fully challenge the triceps chest and anterior deltoids.

i have been stuck doing crossovers (cant even do db flye) and push downs and its really frustrating me that i cant go hard on the pressing

any ideas?

#2

I had an incident a few years back where for a couple of months, my entire chest workout was 12 sets of pec decks, and shoulders were 12 sets of the lateral machine. It sucked, but I didn’t really suffer any muscle loss during the time. Keep your diet as best as you can, and rememeber it’s temporary man.

S

#3

[quote]The Mighty Stu wrote:
I had an incident a few years back where for a couple of months, my entire chest workout was 12 sets of pec decks, and shoulders were 12 sets of the lateral machine. It sucked, but I didn’t really suffer any muscle loss during the time. Keep your diet as best as you can, and rememeber it’s temporary man.

S
[/quote]

that’s been my entire upper body routine for the last 6 weeks…
wrist surgery sux.

i thought it would be a good opportunity to work on squat…but i can’t even grasp the bar enough to safely balance any reasonable amount of weight…so its smith machine squats and lunges…

surprisingly, i have not lost much either except in bis and tris a bit.

on a good note, my calves have never looked better…

#4

I would go to the health food store and get some liquid DMSO to topically apply. Great stuff and is used in my home. Also from Life plus get a bottle of the 100mg Proanthanol-bio complex. Then home-make your self a wrist roller with a length of heavy twine that will go from held at eye level to the floor. Tie on the absolute lightest weight you can imagine.

Hold the wrist roller straight armed out in front of you at eye level, and use your wrists to roll the weight all the way up. Find the lightest weight that youcan accomplish this movement with, at zero pain. Do not work threw pain. This will help get you back to where you want to be.