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Injuries happen not only during fights, but also during preparation. Training can result in various injuries caused by muscle overload, weights and strains that muscles are not physiologically meant to endure.

Armwrestling training is not only working out, but also sparring, which can lead to the same kind of injury as real fights, putting a strain on muscles, tendons and joints.

Training injuries happen a lot less often than fighting ones, and are limited mostly to pulled muscle. Below are listed the more serious ailments caused by bad form and dosage of training.

When training, fighters devote a lot of attention to their wrist, which is a very important part of their fighting “armory”. The wrist’s strength decides on both attack and defense, which is the reason for training it constantly. The most common injury resulting from improper training is the wrist isthmus syndrome.

The wrist bone vault on the palm side, forming a gutter covered by the lateral ligament, forms the wrist tunnel. The resulting cavity contains blood vessels, tendons and nerves that connect to the shoulder nexus and are tightly fitted together. If one of the structures within that cavity suffers an abnormal swelling during training, the result is high pressure inside the wrist. Nerves are the most vulnerable, and so the following symptoms can appear: pins and needles, numbness of fingers, trouble with keeping the wrist in a straight position. The isthmus syndrome is pathological in its nature, its causes are: overload, pressure, heightened pressure inside the wrist and its prolonged misalignment. The main reason for pain on the inside and middle of the wrist is the compression of the middle nerve under the lateral ligament of the wrist.

Overload happens when we put much weight on the wrists, also targeting the flexor muscles and tendons. Heightened pressure on the wrist tunnel happens usually during exercises on machines that are gripped between the thumb pad and the pinky pad. The occurrence of the isthmus is strictly related to improper form of exercises that have a high injury risk rate.

Other typical armwrestling injuries are tennis elbow and golf elbow. The first one is an inflammation of epicondylus medialis of the radial bone, resulting in pains in soft tissue located mid-side in relation to the elbow joint, the pain is heightened when bending the wrist palmwise, which is a common movement in armwrestling. The pain is the result of damage to fastenings of the radial wrist flexor and the oblong pronator muscle.

The tennis elbow is an inflammation of the epicondylus lateralis of the radial bone, resulting in pains in soft tissues located on the side of the elbow joint. The pain is usually the result of damage to fastenings of extensor muscles of fingers and wrist, and can radiate towards forearm and wrist, along the muscle. Damage to those fastenings is a result of frequent extending and rotating of the wrist. During stress periods tissue requires more oxygen, which requirement is usually not fulfilled. In that situation muscle cells may suffer necrosis, and petrification may appear, also in ligaments, tendons and surrounding tissue.

Training is less injury-risk than fighting, but still there is some risk of injury, so one should choose one’s exercises wisely and perform them properly.

In the next part of the series we will present methods of treatment. We’ll present iontophoresis first.

Piotr Szczerba