So a long time ago I bought these hand grippers and removed the soft foam grip that you use when using the grippers. I believe I was thinking that if my hands have to deal with the hard plastic that's under the soft foam grip, my hands would get 'tougher' since not all materials are nice and soft to grip-on in the real world.
(By the way: I think I threw away / lost the soft foam grips, so there's no getting them back.)
(Also: I have no idea what the grip strength level/rating for this is, but it gives me a good hand workout for 20~25 reps)
I found these grippers a month ago and decided to use them for my workouts during the COVID-19 pandemic. I've for the past month or so been doing about 20~25 reps on both hands with this modified hand gripper (no soft foam grip). The hard plastic is slightly uncomfortable and it's got a slightly rough/bumpy surface at some areas, but nothing horribly painful. However, a couple of weeks into this modified gripper I have noticed that there are a couple of small skin abrasions/breaking of the skin on my palm because I'm dealing with this hard plastic. There's no bleeding or anything.... perhaps skin abrasions are good as they make your hand palms tougher with calluses??
I just wanted to know if this "modification" I made is dangerous to my hand palm's health and may cause health complications. Do I need to sanitize the gripper's surface if it is breaking my palm's skin? It was really easy to remove the soft foam grip by the way: (You just slip them off the gripper like taking off socks, so it's not like the manufacturer tried to absolutely prevent people from removing the soft foam grip, but this might be because it's a cheap gripper)
This is what the hand gripper would've hypothetically looked like with the soft foam grip (The black and red foamy bit): https://ibb.co/xzcwNHF
This is what it looks like now without the soft foam grip: https://ibb.co/BrX5Fvm
This is probably quite a weird question to read; Thank you for bearing with me and thank you for your time, everyone!.