Lifting Straps page

[dgreenwood]

I posted this on NF but this place gets a little more traffic:

I jammed/hyper extended the ring finger on my left hand playing basketball last night. This is a common basketball injury and I know from experience that it will likely be swollen/weak/inflexible for at least a couple of weeks. The first think I thought about was "How the hell am I going to dead lift like this!", but of course this is going to affect any pulling exercise where grip is important. I had a pretty crappy night worrying about this but then it hit me, I can use straps! I've never used them before because my grip strength hasn't limited me a whole lot in the weights I can lift.

Here's my question:
Should I use the strap just on my bad hand and let the grip on my good hand continue to do the work or is it a bad idea to mix it up like this. I guess it wouldn't be the end of the world to use straps on both hands for a couple weeks but I'd hate to go back to normal and find that my grip got extra weak.

Thoughts?

[Mr. Anthony]

I'd go ahead and use them on both hands and then ditch them as soon as you're physically able to. My strength went to the next level once I got rid of straps and gloves and stuff. I'd also keep squeezing things like a racquetball or whatever while you're injured just to mitigate your grip loss as much as possible.

[Wanderlust]

Yeah I see nothing wrong with using it a temp. fix until your hand heals. Beats not lifting at all.