Training with broken wrist

I broke my wrist at the UVM collegiate race two weeks ago. I want to continue to some kind of training while I have this cast for 4 weeks. Is there anything besides the extremely boring stationary bike I could be doing?

 

That depends on the extent of your injuries and your comfort level training with a cast on. I trained with a broken wrist once many years ago. I set up a fixed gear bike with a front brake that I could operate with my good hand I only rode on lightly travelled and fairly flat farm roads and put in a lot of miles with my cast resting on the bars set fairly high. By the time I got the cast off I was smoking fit with all the solid training miles and breaking the race - recovery cycle, 'course the season was about over as well.....

Good luck and be sure whatever you try you keep it safe, no sense in getting injured again and possibly more severly just to try to hold a bit of fitness.

-Dave

 

I can't do any real biking at the moment. I had to get some pins put in in order to set the bones, so I should probably stick to low impact stuff until the pins are removed.

 

Maybe not, but it's a challenge that you can rise to.

It's not really all that different from the millions of us (okay, thousands if we just include the cyclists) who are snow-bound (or feel that they are) for several months each winter, and can't get outside for their rides. These forums are full of discussions on the value and challenges of training on exercise bikes, bike trainers, rollers, etc.

Think of this an opportunity to build your mental toughness, fall in like with indoor cycling, and surprise anyone who has already writen off your season due to this injury. Really, if you're committed to improving as a bike racer, this is your chance to show it.

And spend some time on your MP3/IPod playlists.

Good luck.

 

If you want to play it safe, there´s IMHO no way other than training indoors. Last weekend, I met a guy who had broken his left arm and was training outdors. Four days before the cast would have been taken away, he crashed due to the cast. Guess what? He broke the other wrist as well.

On the other hand, I trained outdoors for some weeks with a cast due to a fracture on my left wrist. So, maybe you are es lucky as me or as unlucky as the guy mentioned above...

 

what bone did you break? Speaking from experience, you may jsut want to chill for a while.

I broke my scaphoic (nevicular) bone as a result of a botched takeoff on a jump that launched me about 15 feet in the air from the ground (about 6-8 from the topside of the jump), i left the jump a little sideways and wayy too fast, overshot and missed the backside and came down flat. My DH bike ate most of the impact, but my wrist was a casualty. I was unable to race the next day, and went to the urgent care facility local to my home thinking that this was just a bad sprain.

HA...urgent care docs aren't trained to recognize probable scaphoid breaks because of the way they present on xrays. 4 weeks later my wrist was still jacked beyond belief and I went to the ortho who did the classic snuff box test and said I know what you did. The Dr. (Dr. William Hugh Baugher) who is a reasonably well known hand doctor in the state of MD did what is called a Matti-Russe bone graft with temporary pins. 12 weeks later I was able to ride again. Two years later the bone graft failed and he then did a "bleeding bone" Matti-Russe with permanent Pins. I have progressed from using a removable (clamshell) style wrist splint/cast (a form of Thumb Spica) to race downhill and riding cross country to not wearing anything at all any more.

The reason for posting this recount is to advise you to take care of it and NOT push it. Take some time off, and give it time to heal. If you are any age beyond 18 wrist injuries tend to not recover well without ideal circumstances. I am not a medical doctor or anythign of the sort, but spent countless hours surfing and reading arriving at the conclusion that my recovery is about the best outcome I could have hoped for the second go-round. I have about 85% strength and movement versus my left hand (which is also my dominant hand) If your injury was more traumatic than my scaphoid I would definitely recommend you not stress the joint. I would care not to repeat that episode again...Even being left handed you learn quickly how much you rely on your other side for gross motor skills and such.

 

Thanks for the advice, I'm doing some work on the stationary bike and ab exercises that dont use my wrist.

 

Thanks for that. I fractured my scaphoid in a crash over 2 weeks ago and I'm currently wearing the removable cast until the swelling is completely gone . Luckily my teammate is a sports MD so he recommended a cast despite the fact that it didn't feel too bad. I'd be happy to train indoors through the summer, but alas my knee is also jacked up so no riding for a few weeks minimum.

CTL = 53 (down from 88), TSB = +52 .

 

A guy in our race club was hit by a hit and run driver as he was preparing his build up to the Commonwealth games a year and a half ago. He broke his wrist.

He managed to do most of his build up on a trainer and got Bronze in the TT (the only event he was entered for).
He's probably the hardest man on a bike in New Zealand though!!

 

the big problem with scaphoid fractures is the blood supply. Its a particularly bad bone to break in that the blood supply only enters from the head of the bone. The bone tends to break in the proximal third (nearest the supply) leaving the other 2/3 of bone to basically die if it isn't set back immediately. from my understanding non-union of scaphoid fractures is the norm rather than the exception so healing them can be difficult at best, as was my case (although not the worst since it did eventually heal with two operations).

If you screw it up and it permanently non-unions, your options are simple as i understand it:

wrist fusion or proximal row carpectomy. Neither option was worth not taking a break for me, so I opted to go as easy as my crazy ass could bear to do.

I don't want to sound like a fear monger but any ortho worth his salt will tell you roughly what I am saying. Wrists are complicated double-hinged joints with a variety of things that can happen.

Good luck.

 

I have no clue on how badly broken your wrist is but....

Stick your bike on the trainer and get a set of clip on aerobars. Take ALL the weight off the wrist. If your doc advises against it then stay off the bike and wait. You'll not lose that much fitness that you can't get back in a few weeks but you'll risk making something worse that you'll have to deal with for decades....

 

What is a "bleeding bone" Matti-Russe? I broke my scaphoin right down the middle almost 2 years ago. The emergency room doc spotted it correctly and I had surgery the following week. He screwed the bone together and that was that. It didn't heal. About a year and 3 months later (April) he went in again, this time carving a bone chip out of my hip, putting it in the middle, and screwing it all together. Didn't heal again (well, one joint healed, the downstream blood flow joint didn't heal).

Is the "bleeding bone" Matti-Russe surgery #2 that I already had? I'm not sure what all the technical/slang terms are for this crap.

wrist fusion or proximal row carpectomy. Neither option was worth not taking a break for me, so I opted to go as easy as my crazy ass could bear to do.

What are these? Is that option #3 is? My doctor was talking about cutting a row of 3 bones out as the next step (I'm not sure what the operation is called). I ain't all that fond of that idea. By now my scaphoid is so damn carved up and full of holes, I doubt it's salvagable for any other purpose anyway. If anybody has any insight to any of this, I would appreciate it. I'm wondering if my doc is a quack and I need to look elsewhere. Thanks.

 

As a follow up to my previous post from April, I ended up being in a cast and later a removable splint for a total of 12 weeks. Yes, that meant training indoors during summer. It sucked and I missed the best races of the season, but my scaphoid healed properly, I regained my CTL only recently, and now I'm setting PB's on the bike. I'm glad I listened to the doctor and didn't try to rush things.

 

The matti-russe is done with hip or arm bone that is vascular in nature. The thought is (and I am no doctor) that the bleeding bone will help redevelop and stabilize the rest of the scaphoid. This is usually done with some type of temporary or permanant fixture in the bone (pin, screw,etc..) I have two pins in the scaphoid laid across each other at a pretty acute angle, think a very narrow "X".

A proximal row carpectomy is infact removal of the row of bones including the scaphoid. the wrist is a double hinge, and removing this row of bones effectively removes one hinge point.

Your doctor appears to be using a similar approach as my ortho with respect to this scaphoid injury. The PRC procedure is considered a 'salvage' approach and you should still expect reasonable to good wrist strength and range of motion, from what I have read. But I would grill your doc on this, because I am no expert. I just became very educated on the injury when it happened because I take things like this seriously.

Now I am running my mouth because I have the time as i sit here and nurse a broken fibula back to health. I crashed in a loose patch of gravel and my leg was the casualty. The good news is it was not a bad break as leg breaks go and should heal up well in a few more weeks.