On Jan 2, 11:55*pm, potato wrote:
I'll be going skiing for my first time soon. *I hurt my wrist
this summer. *It's 98% fine now. *But when I rotate my wrists,
my left wrist is a tad tighter than my right one. *And I fear if
I fall on my left wrist again, it'll get hurt easily. *Should I
wear a pair of gloves with wrist guards inside for my first ski
trip?

What if I go snowboarding? Also first time.

Thanks.

I wore a wrist brace while skiing after I got my cast off my broken
wrist. It was a fairly low profile one I got at the drugstore that
fit inside my gloves. Make sure your guard doesn't interfere with
holding the pole. Buying gloves with integrated wrist guards isn't
really necessary, but might be worth it if you take up snowboarding.
If the latter, also pick up some good knee pads and improvise a butt
pad (or buy one if you've got the $$$ to spare). I also wore pads on
my forearms after my first day of snowboarding. I wasn't smart enough
at the time to wear a helmet, but after banging my head on the hard
snow I wised up.

Another issue is thumb injuries when falling. most new skiers'
natural instinct is to put an open hand down on the snow in a fall.
Problem is, the pole is often still in their hand and depending on how
they use their straps, the thumb can get yanked pretty hard.
Hyperextended thumbs rank right up with knee injuries in terms of
number of on-snow injuries. When I was skiing fairly often, I
typically only used the straps when on steep slopes where I thought I
might need the poles to help stop a slide. Here's a description of
what I consider the correct way to use pole straps that someone posted
here a long time ago:

On Nov 21 1999, 2:00 am, "Simon Watkins"
wrote:
I could be teaching Grandma to suck eggs here, but how do you hold your straps?
The reason I ask, is that I suffered a nasty thumb injury when I first
started skiing. Turns out I had my hands through the straps incorrectly. I
had been placing my hands through the top of the loop then grasping the pole.
What I should have been doing, and have been doing since, is bringing
my hands up through the loop, then closing my hand around the pole, thus
sandwiching the strap between palm and pole.

If you are threading your hand through incorrectly, and then take a fall,
the pole does not clear the hand, and is restrained by the strap, thus when
you put your hands out in front of you, your thumb sticks in the snow on
side of the pole, whilst your weight and inertia tries to separate it from
your hand!

Going up through the loop means that if you release your grip on the pole,
it just dangles from your wrist, out of the way. I had several minor thumb
injuries doing it the wrong way, before having my major thumb wrench! That
is when the instructor saw that I didn't like using the straps anymore, and
realised what I'd been doing wrong. Ever since, I've used straps, and have
never suffered the dreaded skiers thumb.

If you don't use straps, you are potentially endangering others if you have
a yard sale on the slopes.

Anyway, like I said, I didn't want to teach Grandma to suck eggs, but I've
seen so many people using straps the wrong way, that it might have been a
possibility.

Simon