Marilia’s Powerlifting Blog

You know how I came into powerlifting? Weird story, but it all started with my hand issue. Long, long ago I used to be a fencing athlete. Close to the National Champs I was the natural candidate to win (and I did), some strange hand injury kept making my hand lose control and drop the weapon. Everyone got really scared and I saw a couple of hand specialists. The first one declared I was never going to practice my sport again and I might have some sort of muscle tumor. I wanted to die. Then a second one dismissed this DX but wasn’t positive as to what as the problem. He just gave me a magic (cortisone) shot in the muscle and the pain disappeared. However, never again I was able to hold the weapon for a long time. I wore a wrist leather band that held it to my arm and, obviously, lost some range of mobility.  

Years passed and I was convinced my strength would never return … I knew I had this chronic hand weakness.  

At a certain point while into more bodybuilding-style training, I wanted to improve my deadlift technique. Which was impossible, due to my hand weakness. I was very disappointed: Then some wise people at forums all over the world suggested GRIP TRAINING and it was magical: my strength returned! And I was finally able to do a decent deadlift! Meanwhile, I met Vitor Barreto, a physiotherapist and athlete who became a real close friend. Not by chance, his nickname here is “Gripmaster … he knows everything there is to know about grip training.  

There was a problem with my skin: there was a general inflammation around the calluses, which was extremely painful. A friend of mine who is a dermatologist suggested I use cortisone ointment and it did help a lot.  

Everything seemed to be going fine. I won the National Open and Master deadlift championship (although with a poor mark, since I passed out in my third attempt because the suit was squeezing my femoral vein: very embarrassing) and my target mark was 140kg for December.  

Until last week. I decided to go back to the basics and do some half-deadlift, or a modified version of “walk the rack: lift the loaded bar only for a couple of inches, just to practice the grip itself (the purpose of the exercise is another, but it helped me with the grip in the past). I just couldn’t. When I got to 100kg, my hand hurt SO much that I quit. I didn’t even feel the weight on the bar … just the pain in the palm of my hands. And then I saw the red aura around the calluses forming again, just like last year. But now it hurts so much I can’t even close my hand today (I did half-deadlift three days ago and deadlift proper yesterday).  

I used the cortisone ointment. I still feel the pain.  

Vitor tells me I have to practice more grip training in order to place the bar exactly on the palm-fingers joint, and not a little above it as everybody does. In my case, this squeezes the calluses and develops this inflammatory reaction.  

I think my hands are still too weak. I regret having stopped grip training for all these months … now I’m convinced I will never have a proper deadlift without it.  

So: back to basics: grip training to death!!  

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 3:23 am and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.