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Comment by mise_en_place | Hacker News Reader

Why not just do incline or decline push-ups? Or weighted pull ups? I feel like handstand push-ups increase your risk of serious arm nerve compression injuries, like ulnar nerve compression at the wrist.

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As someone with wrist pain, I’ve been doing all manner of pushups on fists instead of hands for years.

It feels a lot better(and arguably looks cooler)

Same, and to any reader, make the switch to neutral grip on your presses _before_ you have wrist pain.

Can you elaborate on neutral grip presses? Not sure what that looks like.

Essentially, palms inward instead of downward. It's the natural position your arms are rotated when at your sides.

I misspoke a bit — I specifically was referring to a neutral wrist position when pressing (be it bench, overhead, pushes) w/r/t extension. I’ve seen excessive wrist extension in these movements cause repetitive strain injuries, in my case they lessened significantly when switching to a neutral wrist angle.

I’d imagine flexion also ain’t great to press with, but excessive extension seems to be way more common (and in common push up technique, the norm)

Had to do the same. However, I do handstand push ups on small parallettes[0] which keeps the wrist in the similar position as doing fist push ups, but doesn't hurt my knuckles.

[0]: https://woodpower.com/products/woodpower-parallettes-push-up...

It doesn't seem like an issue for me, if it did I'd explore alternatives.

I already do lots of pushups daily and have for decades, the handstand pushups are just something I enjoy in the morning. It's more how I finish my morning stretches than exercise.

The lots of pushups probably already has my wrists well prepared for the activity.

To get good at handstand push-ups. You can't judge an approach unless you know the goal.

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