Snowboarder's Gear You Don't Want to Wear

Look at this awsome snowboarding gear! It's washable sky-blue fabric with contrasting white adjustable suspension straps, and an autographable cast. The casual unisex styling is one size fits all. This boarding gear is available at your local emergency room for several hundred dollars and a lot of pain. Souvenir X-rays for your wall are optional.

You can qualify to wear this snowboarding gear in a split second: catch an edge or miss a landing and throw out your hands to break the fall. You will either pick yourself up with your pants full of snow or sit there cradling the broken bones in your forearm. If you hurt your wrist like this, please don't try to ride your board down to the bottom of the hill. If you fall again, you risk turning a broken wrist into a life-threatening open fracture requiring surgery and months of physical therapy. Do the safe, if unpopular, thing and call ski patrol. They won't laugh at you, unless they are boarders too.

If you fall just right you can qualify to wear this awesome snowboarding gear on both arms! With both arms in a sling and cast, you are going to have to rely on friends and family for grooming and personal hygiene for six to eight weeks. At the risk of being crude, this means you will need help to wipe your butt for more than a month, maybe two months. How many friends do you have that you can ask to do that? And betties ... think about tampons. Who you gonna ask to do that?

If you don't want to be wearing this gear while your friends are boarding, wear wrist guards. I'm not saying that wrist guards will make you invulnerable, but they reduce the risk of injury, and reduce the severity of the injuries. $40 to $50 spent on a pair of wrist guards is cheap compared to the cost of the cast and sling. Saving you the embarassment of having to ask your friends to wipe your butt? Priceless!

Do wrist guards really prevent broken bones?

Yes. Published medical reports from all over the world (Norway, Canada, Scotland, France, and the USA) all back up my personal observations. Injury rates are significantly reduced compared to snowboarders of equal skill who are not wearing guards.

My personal observations? Injured snowboarders are about 50% of the clientele for the ski patrol where I volunteer. In three years, I have not seen or heard of a snowboarder who was wearing wrist guards and suffered an obviously broken wrist.

What to look for in a snowboarding wrist guard:

The arm bones break when your hand gets hyperextended (bent backwards more than it is meant to) and the stress snaps the bones just above the wrist joint. A wrist guard has to prevent the hyperextension and spread the force of the fall.

1. The stiff part of the guard should be on the back of your hand, not on the palm side.
At a 2005 snow sports conference, the Medicins de Montagne reported some cases of snowboarders whose arms broke under their guards. These boarders were wearing the short, skid-plate guards that are used by inline skaters. A Scottish site has pictures of the injuries, the guard, and x-rays. It appears that he elastic that holds the guards on the palm of the hand could not prevent the hyperextension.

2. If it's shaped to fan out over the back of your hands, narrows at the wrist, and then widens again for the forearm, it's better than a straight one because it spreads the impact over more area.

3. The guard should extend from slightly above your knuckes to about half-way up your forearm.

4. It should fit snugly enough that it doesn't slide down below your knuckles, but not so tight that your fingers are turning blue. Badly fitting guards are barely better than no guards.

What brands are best for snowboarding safety? As an emergency care provider I don't care, as long as it is fits you and fits the criteria above. DAKINE, Flexmeter, SixSixOne, PRO-TEC, Red, and a host of other makers offer wrist guards. They are often built into gloves.

Doesn't wearing wrist guards increase the risk injuries higher up the arm?

This is urban legend that was spawned by misinterpreting one word out of a medical journal article. The abstract of an often-cited study by Hagel says: "use of wrist guards reduces the risk of hand, wrist, and forearm injuries but may increase the risk of elbow, upper arm, and shoulder injuries." In non-scientific English, the word "may" is often used as a synonym for "can". The word "may", in a scientific publication, means that there is no clear proof that it does or doesn't.

Hagel is not claiming that wrist guards can increase risk, he's saying that there is no evidence that they do.

REFERENCES:
Hagel BE et al. The effect of wrist guard use on upper-extremity injuries in snowboarders. Am J Epidemiology. 2005; 162(2): 149-156
Idzikowski JR, Janes PC, Abbott PJ. Upper extremity snowboarding injuries. Ten-year results from the Colorado Snowboard Injury Survey. Am J Sports Med. 28(6): 825-832, 2001
Rønning R, Rønning I, Gerner T et al. The efficacy of wrist guards in preventing snowboarding injuries. Am J Sports Med. 29(5): 581-585, 2001

There are many other reports, and they all reach the same conclusion: wrist braces reduce the possibility of serious wrist injuries.