Fitness trends on TikTok and Instagram promise fast health results, but they often deliver more risks than benefits.
Take one of this year’s popular exercise myths: You can tone your arms with the help of wearable wrist weights. Though the trend has grabbed national headlines, wrist weights won’t tone your arms, said orthopedic surgeon Dr. Paulvalery Roulette of Novant Health Orthopedics & Sports Medicine - Ballantyne in Charlotte.
In fact, you could hurt yourself. Wrist weights are not necessarily a hazard, “as long as you don't put them on too tight and you’re somebody with a healthy heart and lungs,” Roulette said. Otherwise, you could overstress yourself and accelerate your heart rate by adding weight to your walk.
As for our sensitive wrists, most of us don’t realize the stress we put on them throughout the day by writing, typing, doing push-ups and more.
That’s not to say that wrist weights can’t improve your strength. But there’s a catch: Before you strap on a pair, you should be in good shape in order to avoid the risk of injury. Roulette helps set the record straight on this questionable health trend.
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Can wearable wrist weights really tone your arms?
They do not tone your arms; they can only make your arms bigger. The only thing that muscles do is get bigger and smaller. Toning, the word used to describe the look of well-defined muscles, requires losing body fat while gaining muscle, which means controlling your diet and doing exercises that build muscle.
Is there any advantage to wearing weights while walking?
They do have the benefit of making your walk a better workout -- but only if you're healthy. I would be concerned about anything that goes around your wrist, especially something constrictive. There’s a chance of an injury, especially to the nerve that gives you feeling on the backs of your thumb and index and middle fingers.
Wearing something too tight around your wrist – even a watch or a weightlifting glove – can give you numbness or a burning sensation.
What do we take for granted about our wrist strength?
The nerves. A lot of wrist positions during exercise can put undue pressure on those nerves and put people at risk for conditions such as carpal tunnel syndrome, which is common and can cause tingling or numbness so intense that it can wake them up at night.
People with carpal tunnel have too much pressure around the median nerve in their wrist. When that nerve has too much pressure on it, it can’t do its job of providing feeling. Take push-ups for instance. The way a push-up puts your wrists at maximum extension is not ideal for either your cartilage or tendons. Ideally, the more you keep your wrist in a neutral position while exercising is going to be better for you. To be clear, push-ups don’t lead to carpal tunnel syndrome. But if you’ve had it, you may notice more symptoms when your wrist is in a bent position.
You have to think about what the goal of exercise is. Push-ups strengthen your chest muscles; you don't need to stress your wrists at the same time. The best approach is to do push-ups on your knuckles in order to keep your wrists in a neutral position. That said, they’re harder to do and might be too difficult for the average person.
Getting patients back to the lives they want
Dr. Paulvalery Roulette joined Novant Health as a hand and upper-extremity surgeon in 2019.
The Harvard Medical School graduate says his pursuit of orthopedics boils down to a simple philosophy: “You’re trying to get people back to what they were before, or close to it,” he said.
While at school, a visit to Haiti confirmed Roulette’s passion. There he worked with local surgeons and has since returned for medical mission trips.
“I realized how under-resourced surgery was in Third World countries,” he said. “People there need surgery, too. That experience showed me that I could marry a passion of mine with something that I found fun.”
Those travels over the last few years have served his practice here at home.
“We learn from our patients all the time,” Roulette said. “I understand the medicine and the general outcomes. But there’s a lot of practical stuff that patients teach me, and I pass that on to other patients.”
