I personally would go for a makiwara approach for working on alignment and structure. I make sure I'm wearing at least some 4oz mma gloves with decent wrist support if I'm working the bag. Anything at mid to high intensity has the potential to be causing short and long term damage (no matter what art you practice and how you hit) so it's best to always take proper precautions.
Yeah, something with a bit of give like a thai bag is better, but as PiP said, it's about correcting form, not conditioning the hand. It's about sensitivity and instant, realistic feedback, not treating a bag like a "test your strength" machine at the fairground. If you hit someone as hard as you would with boxing gloves on, yes, you can break your hand. You certainly can punch someone in the head hard enough to rock them without breaking your hand though. And yes, for "proper" bag work, bag mitts should be worn. Your post just looks like "don't be stupid" to me, which I was taking as read.
Conditioning for the sake of potentially getting a fight one day in the street is not worth it. I'd take a broken hand over hand conditioning. Shin conditioning is different because it's one large bone and isn't going to cause as much damage in later life.
But good alignment is something that will reduce the risk of injury whether you're wearing gloves or not.
Plot twist! Strengthening your hands and forearms will in fact make them more durable! More muscle to absorb impact, and more bone growth due to resistance against them. There is the unfortunate side effect of being less likely to injure them though using this method : P.
My hands & forearms are pretty strong--I type a lot each day. I also used to use one of these somewhat regularly: (9lbs/finger) I haven't used it for a while, but just found it and will try to start using it regularly again.
Honestly that's more likely to weaken your fingers and forearms than help them. Or perhaps not weaken them per se but set up RSI type situations, create inbalances and overuse injuries. I work in an office full of people typing and using mice all day and there are quite a few incidents of neck pain, shoulder pain and arm/wrist issues.
Nothing stretching and working the extensors of the hand wont help mitigate or fix entirely. There's different types of grip strength and different ways to work them, and all of them use different muscles but contribute to durability. Ironmind.com is a good place to start to learn about it all, and they have books on how to train your hands as well. I'll tell you what though, I got a special gaming mouse called a Naga that has 9 more buttons on it than a regular mouse. When I first started using it it was a whole new kind of pain ::tear::. It was worth getting used to though. My MM Hunter's DPS went through the roof due to improved spell rotation and reaction time. Stop looking at me weird.
So I started using computers regularly at around 6 years old. I used to get RSI type difficulties when I was a younger (10-17?), and had a ganglion cyst develop on my right wrist--I couldn't do pushups except on my knuckles as the 90 degree hand bend position was quite painful in that wrist. However, sometime when I was around 17 the ganglion cyst broke/went away after being there for many years. I no longer experience pain there, and can do push-ups normally, etc. When I use a non-ergonomic keyboard for a long time I do start to get a bit of discomfort. However, with an ergonomic keyboard I can type all day without RSI type discomfort/pain.
Typing does not develop hand strength; holding, pinching, crushing, and opening your fingers against heavy resistance do
But it most certainly does strengthen the forearms. I'm a little skeptical that it wouldn't have any effect on hand strength at all...
I know not everyone is a fan but I think knuckle press ups are a fantastic exercise to help develop wrist strength and alignment. Make sure you're on the two big knuckles and it will help a lot. As for heavy bag work, I'm firmly in the camp of always using bag gloves at the minimum, wraps sometimes too. I do have bag gloves with fingers too though, for when I want to work open hand or grabbing techniques on the bag. Mitch
Circling back with what I'm going to do now, with all the info from this thread. 1. I won't hit my bag with no gloves/wraps on. (I'll use the bag gloves I have.) 2. I will work on strengthening my hands with those gripmaster hand exercisers. I like their various excercises listed on their website, they have recommendations for various sports, including martial arts. I'll actually get a few more of differing tensions as the one I have is too heavy for me to do some of the exercises, and not heavy enough for some others.
Strength is the capacity to move while your movement is being resisted, or to resist or stop the movement of something else, through coordinated muscular contraction, and you develop it by applying force against things that will resist that force (ie closing a grip thingy that wants to open, lifting weights that want to fall downs, pushing or pulling sleds to overcome ground friction, etc). A keyboard does not have any appreciable resistance for the musculature of any healthy person (you do however develop muscular endurance from the repetition of the motion, but that is not the same thing, and as noted earlier you have issues with repetitive strain)
I'll try to explain my confusion. My wife is a teacher and typically doesn't type too much in a day. One day she had to do about 4 hours straight of typing, and she indicated her forearms were fatiguing/burning/etc. When I type all day for 8 hours my forearms may also feel a bit fatigued at some points. It feels similar to when I exercise other muscles--surely exercising these muscles is strengthening them? If I started running and run for an hour, I would expect that exercise to make my leg muscles stronger. Perhaps not the same as doing targeted strength training, but it should still strengthen them some, right?
No. We aren't built to sit at a desk all day. We are designed to move. There are exercises to stretch the muscles in the hand, wrist and forearm and they're easy to do at the end of a day's work.
Repetition over time will give the muscles better conditioning to use energy and output, and to a small degree stronger, but the strength increase curves of quickly unless there is increasing resistance. I type all day and have from a similarly young age and had similar issues, in fact they got worse when I was doing iron Palm training and making poor decisions like heavy bag work without hand protection. Nowadays I regularly have breaks and stretch for a minute in work.
Nope . Strength doesn't increase through fatigue, it increases through strength training, which involves heavy physical resistance. Most kinds of non-strength exercise require a given degree of strength to perform, and no more, and will at best strengthen you to that point, and no further, if you happen to be below it. Typing literally requires negligible strength unless you really need a new keyboard . To better express my perspective here, your grip exerciser is rated at 9lb per finger. For people who devote time to hand gripper training, the "big name brand" is IronMind's Captains of Crush, of which the lightest training version is rated at 60lbs, and the heaviest one (only ever fully closed by about 5 people ) is something like 365lbs.
Well, I will have a variety of grip options then as I'll get one of theirs as well; I'll try the 100lb. The ones I have now are good for a variety of finger exercises besides just the crush grip.
(Excuse the momentary derail, but...) 365lbs??? Forgive the fanboy parlance, but are these 5 people also collectively known as the Avengers??? Travess