How do you toughen hands?

Answer 1

rub your hands on a thick rope for five minutes even if it starts to bleed just keep going

The first answer (above) was a terrible suggestion. There are many ways to toughen one's hands, and although trying to toughen a single part of the body may be successful to some degree, toughening, strengthening or changing any part of the body requires a comprehensive approach and it NEVER involves damaging the any part of the body. While it's true that some of the conditioning will probably involve physical duress that my cause pain, the pain should not be the result of injuring oneself.

The pain from training - whether it be Martial Arts, weight lifting, dance training, Hatha yoga and such - is classified as "good pain" and "bad pain." To be specific, if I am power lifting with weights and doing, for example, a dead lift, I will definitely feel stressor-induced pain immediately, and that will result in a different pain within a few minutes or a few hours. That pain should be from cellular waste, and it will hurt as long as it takes my body to excrete it through processes of breathing, urinating, sweating or expelling fecal matter. The amount of time that it takes to stop hurting depends on how long I've been training consistently, or how well I am conditioned.

The feeling of the pain itself is always subjective, and is also dependent on the level of my conditioning.

The same goes for martial arts: If I want to train my hands, then to strengthen the muscles in my hands I will use various devices like rubber balls and machines. To strengthen my skin and connective tissues in my hands, and to avoid getting calluses I will also regularly use liniments. To toughen the hands the training would also require progressively striking pads, boards and stone or concrete.

Meditation is also extremely important in any conditioning. Without meditation, no one will achieve the level that they seek to attain in any type of training. Meditation is your machine for creating and channeling your own personal powerhouse of energy (chi, ki, qi - call it what you will). If you cannot condition the mind, how can you condition the body? (When I use the word "mind," I am specifically referring to Merriam Webster's definition 2 a : the element or complex of elements in an individual that feels, perceives, thinks, wills, and especially reasons).

Both the mind and the body are to separate units of a whole machine, and if one part doesn't work well neither will the whole - which brings us back to the comprehensive aspect of training.

If you decide that you want to toughen your hands, you may be able to toughen them by focusing entirely on your hands, but strong hands need strong arms and strong arms need a strong torso, if you happen to be standing if you ever fight, spar or compete (unlikely that you'd be sitting, don't you think?) then you'll need a really powerful stance, which means that you need a powerful abdomen, a powerful back and powerful legs. And to plant you feet well, you also need powerful feet, and to achieve that full balance, you need to meditated because without a powerful and balanced mind (center, soul, atma, spirit - call it what you want), you'll never find that balance in your body. Do you see what I'm getting at?