[Dingdong]

As a sufferer of incredibly dry skin, splits, cracks and general skin issues that come with dry skin I thought it could be useful to have a thread for people to share their tips and tricks for moisturising, sanding, tools etc.

Usually as the season changes into winter around January my skin becomes particularly bad and I start getting splits on my tips which can be game over for the grit season so I’ve had to come up with some ways of managing this.

I’ll throw a few of my own tips:

- drink 2 litres of water per day

- Moisturising creams that work well: Cerave Reparative Hand Cream, Elizabeth Arden 8 hour cream, okeefes working hands, climbskin, rhino split - I try to stick to dermatologically tested hand creams rather than climbing balms but some do work well like split

- in case of splits use a razor blade to trim down the split on both sides so there’s no overhanging skin, essentially creating an open valley, moisturise hands with hand cream then use a globule of rhino split and shove it into the valley, tape up overnight. Skin heals better when it’s at maximum moisture and taping crates the necessary humidity, heals the split within 2-3 days, once it’s healed over make sure to sand it lightly every day to keep the skin even

- use a manicure dremel to sand calluses on palms, can also be used to sand the joints between fingers where skin builds up and can split

- moisturise with cotton gloves overnight to keep skin very moisturised

- use water or something like rhino spit before applying chalk - janja/ondra also does this before her sessions as they suffers from dry skin, means less dry fires and less likely to split

- stop before you split!! (One I really need to work on) - as we all know it’s much easier to heal grated skin but a split takes much much longer.

If ya have any tips please share them, always looking to up my skin maintenance 

[Mostly_Inanimate_Beans]

Usually have absolutely sopping hands but on the rare occasion I've managed to use too much antihydral I've found a combination of 25,000 iu vitamin e cream and vaseline has helped

[cheque]

Slather your hands in E45 before bed and wear cotton gloves overnight.

Less-followable advice (but advice that seems a big factor in me never having split a tip, even when I actually went bouldering): Play guitar and bass from your mid-teens onwards.

[Dingdong]

Slather your hands in E45 before bed and wear cotton gloves overnight.

Less-followable advice (but advice that seems a big factor in me never having split a tip, even when I actually went bouldering): Play guitar and bass from your mid-teens onwards.

I played guitar and still do from the age of 10 so 23 years now and it’s made no difference  I don’t use the pads of my fingers, I use the tips so sadly no calluses built where I need em :p

I’m gonna try the cotton glove beta tonight though, I know a few people who do it and swear by it!

[spidermonkey09]

Sand down the split as they heal, essentially bringing the split towards the surface of the skin. This prevents a superficial appearance of healing where it's knitted over the top but not deeper in the tissue. If you don't so this you risk repeatedly splitting in the same place. I had a real problem with this in 2018 on my right index and climbed most of the sport season with a recurrent split.

Edit, you mentioned this, my bad

[cheque]

I played guitar and still do from the age of 10 so 23 years now and it’s made no difference  I don’t use the pads of my fingers, I use the tips so sadly no calluses built where I need em :p

Sounds like you need to switch to bass then! 

I’ve always known wearing skin on the pad away from sliding off slopers as “going through” rather than a split but a good way to toughen up your pads is to sand them a bit every day that you don’t climb.

[Dingdong]

I played guitar and still do from the age of 10 so 23 years now and it’s made no difference  I don’t use the pads of my fingers, I use the tips so sadly no calluses built where I need em :p

Sounds like you need to switch to bass then! 

I’ve always known wearing skin on the pad away from sliding off slopers as “going through” rather than a split but a good way to toughen up your pads is to sand them a bit every day that you don’t climb.

I sometimes wear through tips but it’s usually splits that I get, especially crimping on grit or anything super crystally - I think my skin may genuinely be my most limiting factor because I find myself on pulling as hard as I can in fear of splitting… 

[lagerstarfish]

Possibly mentioned already and certainly mentioned by me at every opportunity...
25% urea heel balm works great for splits in hard dry skin. Also good for split and messed up nails (hands and feet). I assume that all medical trials have been on feet, but climbers hands get into a similar state.
Spread thinly at night. Improves noticeably overnight.
You can buy 40% urea cream which is good for softening any bits of nail or hard skin that you need to soften up to the point where you can peel it off after a night of being marinated.

[remus]

Proper old lady stuff this, but I had a perma-split heal for a couple of years which was pretty annoying. Best thing I did for it was to get regular and aggressive with sanding back any hard, dry skin and then smash the moisturiser. A few rounds of that over a few weeks, and regular ongoing moisturising, seems to have fixed things for the moment 🤞

I think the important part is not letting hard, inflexible skin build up around the split as this then makes it very easy for the split to re-open (which is what was happening when I was just moisturising and not sanding back aggressively enough).

[jwi]

I have very thick skin (due to a genetic variation) and the skin is also increadibly dry in the winter. I do get splits. Best preventive care I found is to file down the callluses on the fingertips (this probably only applies to few) but also on the creases between the phalangs (painful and nasty to sandpaper).

When the split invariably happens really fat cream helps. From the litterature it seems like there is not much of a difference between effects of different creams except the difference that can be explained by fat content. I keep the cream in place overnight with loosely wrapped athletic tape. I'm partial to creams containing dexpanthenol as it has som small but clinically proven effects  ( https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09546634.2017.1325310 ). In France I like the increadibly greasy cream with dexpanthenol sold under the brand-name Bephanten. (I do not know what it is called elsewhere)

As mentioned above Urea might also help, but should probably not be used for deep cracks with open wounds?

[Johnny Brown]

I used to get perma-splits in my heels most winters, but since finding an athlete's foot cream that actually works (Scholl) it has been much less of an issue. Worth a try, even if seemingly unaffected as the spores are ubiquitous. Scholl cracked heel balm is also useful. Also avoid being barefoot unless it's boiling.

[JamieG]

Possibly mentioned already and certainly mentioned by me at every opportunity...
25% urea heel balm works great for splits in hard dry skin. Also good for split and messed up nails (hands and feet). I assume that all medical trials have been on feet, but climbers hands get into a similar state.
Spread thinly at night. Improves noticeably overnight.
You can buy 40% urea cream which is good for softening any bits of nail or hard skin that you need to soften up to the point where you can peel it off after a night of being marinated.

I’m normally pretty lucky with my skin. But the few times I’ve had cracks especially near  the nail this stuff has sorted it out pretty quickly. 👍

[Ballsofcottonwool]

Soap/handwash is your worst enemy, water is your 2nd.

I've manage to almost completely eliminate my dry skin and Eczema  on my hands by drastically reducing the number of times that I wash my hands. Before you call me out as a clatty minger, I wear "disposable" nitrile gloves for any task which I'd normally want to wash my hands before and after. e.g. cooking, DIY, Bike maintenance, household cleaning. I wash the gloves instead and hang them up to dry so they can be reused again.

If I do get a flare up, I've found that lansinoh pure lanolin ointment ( its sold as nipple cream in the baby aisle) works better than anything else. Its much closer to the natural skin oils you're trying to replace than anything derived from mineral or vegetable sources. For the same reason I use Simple soap because it is tallow based.

Sanding off dry skin and callouses helps avoid splits, but I find its important to use a light pressure because pressing hard seems to encourage my skin to grow thicker.

I also suffer from cracked heels, and find a combination of sanding with a long strip of sharp 120grit emery cloth focusing on speed rather than pressure removes skin without encouraging thickening.  Lansinoh is too expensive to put on my feet, so I use Palmer cocoa butter heel balm .

[cheque]

I had a perma-split heal

This must be the discussion where the difference between heel and heal is the most important.

an athlete's foot cream that actually works (Scholl)

Googling the Scholl cream and looking in my bathroom cupboard tells me that this is the same stuff (same active ingredient anyway- terbinafine hydrochloride) as I was prescribed a few days ago.

[Dingdong]

Some excellent tips from everyone, thanks all, i'll look at adding some of these to my repertoir 

[JamieG]

I played guitar and still do from the age of 10 so 23 years now and it’s made no difference  I don’t use the pads of my fingers, I use the tips so sadly no calluses built where I need em :p

Sounds like you need to switch to bass then! 

I’ve always known wearing skin on the pad away from sliding off slopers as “going through” rather than a split but a good way to toughen up your pads is to sand them a bit every day that you don’t climb.

Out of interest do you also avoid finger injuries. I’ve played musical instruments most of my life (piano, cello and guitar) and haven’t ever really struggled with finger injuries. Maybe it’s just luck but I did wonder if there is a correlation there.

[cheque]

Out of interest do you also avoid finger injuries.

No  But I’ve never really had a pulley injury, whenever I’ve hurt my fingers it’s been collateral ligaments or the dreaded cartilage-in-the-knuckle-that-everyone-initially-thinks-is-a-stress-fracture-and-takes-ages-to-heal thing. No idea if that’s related to playing music, probably not. I think the length of your fingers is a more of a factor in what sort of tweaks you get.

I should add that I’m not the sort of practices for hours every day sort of musician but I’ve definitely carried thick finger skin through with me from the periods in my life when I played all the time.

There’s crossover the other way too- having less weedy fingers from climbing absolutely makes playing the guitar and bass easier in some ways. I couldn’t really do hammer-ons on bass or those Hendrix-style trills before I climbed and when playing the piano/ keyboard I’ve found I can now hit single keys really hard if required without any wrist input 

[Dingdong]

Out of interest do you also avoid finger injuries.

No  But I’ve never really had a pulley injury, whenever I’ve hurt my fingers it’s been collateral ligaments or the dreaded cartilage-in-the-knuckle-that-everyone-initially-thinks-is-a-stress-fracture-and-takes-ages-to-heal thing. No idea if that’s related to playing music, probably not. I think the length of your fingers is a more of a factor in what sort of tweaks you get.

I should add that I’m not the sort of practices for hours every day sort of musician but I’ve definitely carried thick finger skin through with me from the periods in my life when I played all the time.

There’s crossover the other way too- having less weedy fingers from climbing absolutely makes playing the guitar and bass easier in some ways. I couldn’t really do hammer-ons on bass or those Hendrix-style trills before I climbed and when playing the piano/ keyboard I’ve found I can now hit single keys really hard if required without any wrist input 

I recorded myself playing guitar for the first time in a while and couldn’t believe how much bigger my hands look, they look like bloody mallets