No, you do not have to be “extra careful.” Here, let me let you in on a little “secret” that most gym rats won’t tell you. You might want to sit down and hold on tight to your protein shake for this one because it’s going to be a bumpy ride! Okay, you ready?… I'm a thin-wristed amateur rock climber. The biggest problem I've had was having to remove links from metal wristwatches to get them to fit!
You can’t increase the size of your wrist bones!
Still hanging on? Let me repeat this for the people in the back in the cheap seats:
You can’t increase the size of your wrist bones!
That is, once you reach adulthood and your bones stop growing, you wrist bones are as wide-looking as they’re ever going to be. Therefore when all the gym rats answer the questions on Quora about developing the long-sought-after thick wrist aesthetic what they’re talking about is wrist… muscle. In simplest terms—and sports doctors and physiotherapists who make way more money than me can chime in—it’s the size of your forearm muscles that you want to develop, which are developed, just like other arm muscles, by starting off light and working your way up.
Plumbers tend to “naturally” have big forearms because of the type of motions they do all day—twisting this and pulling that—which work the forearm muscles. Standard lifting motions like bicep curls and bench pressing will engage the forearm area and lead to forearm/wrist muscle growth but, for faster “service,” you can “spot-work” on the forearms “like a plumber” through, ironically enough, lighter weights which you use by twisting your hands about the wrist bones.
Let’s take this healthy couple for example. You’ll notice almost instantly that they’re both very well developed throughout the arm area, with excellent bicep and tricep definition as well forearm definition. Okay, stop staring at her for second! She and he obviously spend their gym time well! Less texting and Facebooking, more lifting, my friends! It’s not “thumbs day”! The point to be made is look at her wrists and look at his. Despite the differences in muscle build based on biology are his wrists really that much bigger than hers? Forget the forearm—just the wrist itself—the band he’s wearing make it easy to spot the wrist bones. The answer is no. His are not monumentally bigger than hers even after clearly months of work. You can’t change the size of your wrist bones.
Long-story-short, again, stop focusing on the size of your wrist bones and start off working them just as you would work any other muscle groups: slow, good form and gradual increases in weight as the muscles naturally tear and rebuild themselves bigger and stronger.
Addendum:
The same thing goes with calf muscles, a-k-a soleus. You can’t change the size of your ankle bones either, but you can work the muscles in that area. Again, look at this awesome couple and, even though it’s more blurry in the back of the picture, you can make out their toned calf muscles, but, just like with the wrists, the ankles themselves aren’t monumentally different in size.
Picture Source Wikipedia
Thanks for Reading
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