palms

Every time I do any kind of press my left palm just kills me, it hurts right above my thumb joint. The worst exercise is db shoulder press, I have found a way to compensate by rolling the weight on my fingers and bending my wrists, but I feel like I am losing power. I tried buying some harbinger gloves but the difference is minimal. Does anybody know a) what could cause this. b) what I can do about it. or c) any other way I could compensate.

Pain is your body’s way of telling you that something is wrong. Of course, knowing the difference between muscle pain and injury is an asset.

Anyway, the pain in your thumb is a signal to you that you need to do a few things.

  1. Avoid movements that reproduce the pain (temporarily).
  2. Don’t try to compensate by altering your grip/hand position as you’d simply be avoiding the problem instead of addressing it. Compensation often results in later onset secondary problems anyway.
  3. Have a doctor or specialist (i.e., ART practioner) look at it to determine the injury.
  4. Treat the injury and then attempt to determine what caused it in the first place so that you don’t end up causing it again.

Just my thoughts.

“Kinetics” speaks words of wisdom! Even the strongest guy in the gym has at least one hidden weakness, and, sooner or later, he’ll find an exercise that reveals the weakness. Maybe he can squat and deadlift 400kg for reps, but, if he does enough dumbell reverse wrist curls, he gets some damn injury like carpal tunnel syndrome. Don’t try to train through the problem: if you continue to do more of the same things in the same way, you get more of the same problem. Once you cure the problem and find out what caused it, you may find that it’s easy to train around it.
Strength & courage,
“Coach Joe”

There are lots of nerves in the hand, and some people’s are closer to the surface than others. Sounds like you are compressing them with the overhead presses. I had this problem a little when I first started, it took a little getting used to and I had to build some muscle in my hands, then it went away. Does it hurt when you do dips?

Fnord - no it does not hurt when I do dips, but I think that is because my dip machine has very wide grips, it just hurst when I have any accute pressure on that part of my palm.

The last exercise that caused me these problems was the dip. Everytime I performed it, pain would shoot up my left arm. I stopped doing them for a while, of course. Really sucks to cut an exercise out, but it sounds like it is necessary.

Like I said, building hand muscles is what helped me. Look up grip exercises on the site. I would list some, but they write them better.
If you actually did any nerve damage, B6 and B-complex will help repair the coating around the nerve (the nerve coating may be worn, and that could cause pain too).