5 Tips on How to Control Your Calluses

Calluses are inevitable part of your training. Gripping a bar or a handle creates pressure on your skin and a result, the skin pinched between the piece of equipment and your fingers reacts to this stress, and forms hard skin in order to protect itself from tears and blisters.

However, if you don’t treat your calluses, they might rip off and make your life even harder. And, probably keep you away from the bars for at least a week.

1. Gloves

One things is for sure - gloves can help you minimize the formation of calluses. However, wearing gloves might impact your performance, because you won’t get a full “feel” of the bar depending on the surface of the glove, but these days there are many gloves on the market made of many different materials, covering different part of your palms or fingers, so you should try them out and find out what suits you best. The main difference is that some of them are really slippery. And it’s important that you find the right size otherwise they will really get on your nerves.

2. Gripping the bar

The way you grip the bar has a direct impact on your calluses. If you grab the bar with  where your fingers connect to the palm, this will minimize calluses, because less skin will be trapped between the equipment and your fingers. If you grab it with the middle of your palm, you’ll squash a whole bunch of your flesh and skin.

3. Do it yourself: removing calluses

Trust us - you don’t want to remove the entire layer of the hard skin on your hands. After all, calluses form to protect your hands. But what you might want to do is to keep them in control.

You will need some tools - a pumice stone and a metal file (a foot rasp). You can buy these cheap in your local drug store.

Soak your hands in a bucket of water for 10 min with some Epsom salts or even better, do this at the end of your daily shower when your skin has already softened. First take a rasp (or a metal file) and start filing. You will see a bunch of white dead skin on the file, just a proof that you’re doing it right.

After you have scraped off the hardest part, take a pumice stone and gently smooth the skin by rubbing. Then dry your hands and apply moisturizer or a hand cream.

4. Hand cream

No matter if you’re a man or a woman, keeping your hand moisturized softens your skin and prevents it from becoming so dry that it cracks. Before going to bed, apply a layer of an moisturizing hand cream or a lotion. 

5. Don’t pick!

Keep one thing in mind - never pick your calluses. That way you are just telling your skin it needs to roughen up even more. They might even break and cause them to bleed. And there you are again - stuck at home.