Designed to help prevent dorsal hyper-flexion, the Tiger Paw Wrist Support has a replaceable foam pad. To increase the levels of support, extra plastic battens may be inserted in the Velcro pocket.
Tiger Paw Wrist Support – $50 – Gibson Athletic
These have become so popular in North America that they are almost essential equipment for girls over age 12. Yet boys rarely wear them … even though they do much more work on the wrists.
Designed to help prevent wrist pain, the Ezy ProBrace provides strong support in wrist extension and hyperextension but still maintains flexibility. A unique “palmar pad” minimizes the angle to the wrist joint and evenly distributes impact and weight across the palm to cushion high impact forces. Pad is detachable for when the palm of hand needs to be exposed.
Ezy ProBrace by Gibson – $51 – Amazon.com
At my gym over half the older girls wear Tiger Paws. When I quizzed them, they were unanimous:
“If you don’t need them, don’t wear them. But if you do need them, wear them as much as possible. They really reduce wrist pain while training.”
Fad or training essential? Leave a comment if you have an opinion.
==== UPDATE:
From Chris in the comments:
The question that I have is how much are we loading the elbow and shoulder with the use of these? Whenever you bind a joint, the load is going to be transferred up the kinetic chain. Looking at the lower extremity, it’s very common to tape ankles or wear ankle braces in many sports. A lot of coaches see this as a preventative mechanism. But, how much load is being transferred to the knee and hip and what are the repercussions? Joints are built to go through a particular range-of-motion as that allows them to aid in force dissipation and energy absorption when combined with eccentric (lengthening) muscle activity.
The upper extremity is not as well explored in research as the lower extremity because it is structurally more complex than that of the lower extremity. So this is an interesting question yet to be answered.
I have no issues with wearing these if the kids are experiencing pain. Some simply do not have the wrist flexibility for some of the wrist extension/hyperextension positions that they are forced into. I can attest that I feel their pain as I’m currently learning to Olympic lift and catching a clean without good wrist flexibility can take its toll, no doubt.
But, I still have questions about their efficacy and drawbacks.
Gymnastics Coaching.com 
Chris,
The use of wrist guards, like these, is helpful. You’re not binding a joint, as you said. You’re diffusing the force on the joint. If you taped a wrist, I may get your argument. I feel like you’re asking about physics you don’t get. It’s hard to do to an ankle what you’d do to a wrist in terms of overall function in this applications That is, wrists are not ankles. You cannot think of them the same way. most of us don’t start out bearing our body weight on our hands. Shoulders and elbows are not to wrists as hips and knees are ankles. If I tumbled on my fingertips, your argument would be weird still. Because nobody does.
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I think people need to be smarter about using these supports. Many people get wrist pain and just oh, my wrists hurt I will just wear them and don’t think about other aspects of the wrist such as strength and flexibility. People need to work on the wrist strength and flexibility too in order to prevent longer term injuries. It is also useful to be smarter with training and do more repetitions on the tramp and less on floor/vault to reduce the load too. It’s fine to wear them, but be smarter with training and look at the full picture.
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