Buy a Deadlift If You Want to Keep Leg Hair
For eight years I could not grow hair on my legs along my shins.
The blame, you guessed it, is the regular deadlift . I love deadlifts more than any other job because I enjoy lifting and lowering heavy things. But as the saying goes, the things we love the most also hurt us, and deadlifts are no exception.
As we wrote earlier , the deadlift works best when you hold the bar very close to your body. This could mean scratching your shins from time to time, and in my case years of plucking my leg hair along with it.
The knee-highs are great, just ask our Vitals editor , Beth. Even so, I often find accidental cuts on my shins that cannot always be prevented with socks. Even worse, my gym only has hex plates – I know I need a new gym, but it’s so cheap and cramped, which means that during deadlifts, the bar can roll an inch towards me during repetitions, colliding with mine. shins. It was then that I recently decided to try shin guards, like the ones you can use in football, but designed specifically for lifting weights.
And readers, let me get into a few points, they are great for deadlifts. When I tried them last month, I was able to pull the bar up over my legs without feeling pressure on my shins or pulling my hair out. The cushioning is pretty nice and I still feel like I’m stroking my shins adequately enough.
In particular, the ones I use are much thinner than your regular soccer shin guards, which is to be expected for deadlifts. My visor has about 5 millimeters of shock in the front, which is made of neoprene, and a thinner nylon sleeve in the back. The forefoot is thicker than your middle toe, but that doesn’t stop you from keeping the bar close to your body. It stretches to the knee and wraps around the ankle, and has a strap at the base of the foot to keep it from running over the leg. It looks a lot like a compression sleeve – some brands sell it as a compression sleeve, but mine does not – and I tend to forget that it is even dressed during training, except that it keeps warm so my legs warm up pretty quickly.
Depending on the pair and brand, they are more expensive than a pair of socks; For this reason, I was hesitant to spend on deadlift defenders. (How can I justify spending $ 27 on SOCKS?) But it’s worth it knowing I can keep fit without sacrificing my shins.
Of course, you’ll have to wash them just as often as you would with any other sports equipment because they trap a lot of sweat, but that’s better than not having whole strands of hair on your legs.