Does collagen help wrist pain from lifting?

Four lifter's wrists: the back, the little finger side, the thumb side and the fingers, and which of the four is a tendon

Does collagen help wrist pain from lifting is a question that the tendon shelf answers as if a wrist were a tendon, and the honest page begins with the fact that most wrist pain from lifting is not a tendon problem at all, so that the lifter's wrist has to be sorted into its four usual complaints before collagen's lane can be found, and the lane turns out to be one of the four. The first wrist hurts on the back, and it hurts in extension under load. The front rack position of a clean or a front squat, with the bar on the shoulders and the wrists bent back to hold it; the overhead press with the bar sitting on wrists that have let it roll toward the fingers; the push-up and the bench press with the hand bent back under the bar; the handstand: each of these pins the wrist in extension under the body's weight or the bar's, and the pain that results is felt on the back of the wrist, deep, often with a pinch at the end of the range, and it is dorsal wrist impingement, the joint capsule and the small bones at the back of the wrist being compressed together at the end of extension, a position problem that is fixed by position, a straighter wrist, the bar seated over the heel of the hand and the forearm bones rather than the fingers, a wider or narrower front rack, wraps for the heaviest sets to limit the extension, and mobility work for the shoulders and elbows whose stiffness pushes the wrist into the end of its range. It is not a tendon, and nothing on the tendon shelf applies to it. The second wrist hurts on the little finger side, with twisting and with the hand bent toward that side under load: the deadlift grip as the bar settles, the catch of a clean or snatch as the wrist turns over, the bottom of a press, the twist of a kettlebell, with a click or a clunk sometimes and a sense of weakness in the grip. This is the triangular fibrocartilage complex, a small disc of cartilage and ligament at the end of the forearm's outer bone that cushions it against the wrist bones and stabilises the joint where the two forearm bones meet, which is torn by a fall or a twist or worn by repetition, and it is cartilage and ligament rather than tendon, needing a clinician's assessment, sometimes a scan, a period of splinting or taping and a graded return, with a surgeon for the tears that do not settle; the hand's ligaments, which the fall that tears this disc can also damage, are sorted on the hand ligaments page. The third wrist hurts on the thumb side, at the base of the thumb and over the bony point of the wrist beneath it, with gripping and with moving the thumb, and the test that names it is to tuck the thumb into the fist and bend the wrist toward the little finger, which produces a sharp pain over the thumb-side wrist. This is De Quervain's tenosynovitis, the two long tendons that pull the thumb out and back, running together through a tight fibrous sheath at the wrist, inflamed and thickened where the sheath pinches them, and it is the one tendon problem of the four, provoked by gripping, by the hook grip in which the thumb is trapped under the fingers, by lifting a child under the arms and by the thumb's work on a phone, commonest in new parents and in lifters who have changed their grip. The fourth wrist does not so much hurt as tingle: numbness or pins and needles in the thumb, index and middle fingers and half the ring finger, worse at night and when the wrist is held bent, in the front rack or on a bar, sometimes shaken out on waking, with a clumsy grip and wasting at the base of the thumb if it has gone on for months. This is the median nerve compressed where it passes through the carpal tunnel at the wrist, a nerve problem that a bent wrist under load aggravates and that no tendon programme reaches, with a night splint, position changes and a clinician's assessment as its route, and the hand's own tendonitis, in its three columns of today, the weeks and the months, on the hand tendonitis page.

One tendon: the programme for De Quervain's, where collagen sits beside it, what the other three wrists want instead, and the worked example

The one tendon wrist is treated as every tendon problem is treated, with the sheath adding a wrinkle, and collagen's lane is beside that treatment. De Quervain's is a tenosynovitis rather than a plain tendinopathy, the inflammation sitting in the sheath the two thumb tendons share as much as in the tendons, so its first move is to take the provoking load off the sheath: a thumb spica splint that holds the thumb still for the daily tasks that provoke it, a change from the hook grip to a conventional or mixed grip so the thumb is no longer trapped under the fingers, straps for the pulls so the thumb stops clamping the bar, and the phone in the other hand. The second move is the loading that every tendon needs once the sheath has settled: isometric holds of the thumb against resistance for pain, then slow eccentric and concentric loading of the thumb's extension and abduction against a band and of wrist radial deviation against a light weight, every second or third day over the weeks and months, with grip work returning as the tendons tolerate it; a corticosteroid injection into the sheath is one of the few tendon conditions in which injection has a reasonable record, since the target is the sheath's inflammation rather than a degenerate tendon, and a clinician decides. Collagen's pre-loading protocol belongs beside the loading sessions, 15g of gelatin or collagen with vitamin C about an hour before, on the strength of the synthesis marker it raised in healthy men and the one small Achilles tendinopathy trial beside calf strengthening, with no trial in any wrist or hand tendon and the honest expectation of an adjunct and not a treatment, as for the golfer's elbow one joint up on the golfer's elbow page. What the other three wrists want instead is each different and none is swallowed. The back-of-wrist impingement wants position, a straighter wrist under the bar and the mobility that lets the shoulders and elbows take the range the wrist was being made to find, with wraps as a tool and not a cure. The little finger side wants a clinician, because a torn triangular fibrocartilage complex is managed by its tear, splinted and taped for the ones that settle and repaired for the ones that do not, and a lifter who grips and twists through it for a season widens it. The fingers want a nerve plan, a night splint that holds the wrist straight while the reader sleeps, a front rack and a bar position that keep the wrist out of its bent extreme, and a clinician's assessment with nerve tests if the tingling persists or the thumb's muscles weaken, since a nerve compressed for long enough loses function that does not return. A reader who takes collagen for a wrist that tingles, clicks on the little finger side or pinches at the back in extension has bought a tendon adjunct for a joint, a cartilage disc or a nerve, and the first thing any lifter with wrist pain does is press the four places and name the wrist. The worked example is the adjunct for the one tendon wrist at habit scale, stated on its true terms: two capsules, 1200mg hydrolysed type 1 marine collagen with 12mg vitamin C at 15% of its reference value plus zinc, 120 for £16.99 at 28p a day, lab tested and UK made, below the 15g protocol dose, carrying vitamin C's collagen formation sentence for cartilage and bones and no tendon or wrist claim. Does collagen help wrist pain from lifting: for one wrist in four, the thumb-side tendon, as an adjunct beside its loading with no wrist trial, and for the other three the answer is position, a clinician and a nerve plan.

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