Part of Ice hockey and skiing injuries: ski boots, skates and what each sport does to a body
Ski pole thumb injury: how a pole tears the ligament, and skiing afterward
Warning signs, and when to get help
How does a ski pole tear the thumb ligament?
The ligament sits on the inner side of the thumb's main knuckle, where the thumb meets the hand, and its job is to stop the thumb being pushed away from the fingers when you pinch or grip. Tearing it takes a force that drives the thumb out and back, and skiing supplies that force in a particular way.
The published mechanism is a fall onto an outstretched hand with the thumb held out, because the hand is still gripping the pole when it reaches the snow (Davey and colleagues, 2019). That review adds two details that are easy to overlook. Hard-packed snow or icy conditions make it worse, because the hand stops dead instead of sliding or sinking. And the pole can act as a lever, so the force is amplified instead of simply absorbed by the hand.
The nearest thing to a number on that mechanism comes from a two-season series at a high-volume trauma center in the Italian Dolomites. Of 195 distal upper limb injuries, 96, 49.2 percent, were fractures and 33, 16.9 percent, were isolated tears of this thumb ligament, and those tears were often related to the pole becoming trapped in a fall (Festini Capello and colleagues, 2025). That series counts skiers and snowboarders together, although only 1 of the 195 was recorded on a snowboard, so in practice its totals describe skiers.
How often does it happen? The 2019 review calls thumb ligament injury by far the most common hand injury in alpine skiing, and reports that it may be the most common ski injury of all but is frequently underreported because people do not think it is serious (Davey and colleagues, 2019). That superlative comes from a source the review cites, not from its own counting, so take it as the review's reading. Its own tables are firmer and more useful. Counted across them, the thumb sits in the top five of four independent series: this injury was the second commonest diagnosis in a series of 20,045 cases, the third in one of 9,465 and the fourth in a Scottish series of 440, and the thumb was the third commonest injury site at 8 percent in a United States series of 1,196 and the fourth at 7.1 percent in that same Scottish one.
Why do snowboarders almost never get it?
Because they have nothing in their hands. The 2019 review states that snowboarders experience this type of injury very infrequently, which implicates the pole as the probable cause among skiers, and says again elsewhere that thumb ligament injuries are very uncommon in snowboarders (Davey and colleagues, 2019).
That is about as close to a natural experiment as sports injury research gets. Two groups of people fall over on the same snow, on the same days, in the same conditions. One group lands with a pole in each hand and tears thumb ligaments. The other lands with empty hands and breaks wrists instead: across a decade of resort injury reports from 29 western Canadian ski areas, skiers were most prone to knee injuries and snowboarders most prone to wrist injuries (Dickson and Terwiel, 2021).
That is the fact worth keeping. The pole is doing this, not the snow and not bad luck.
Where and when on the mountain does it happen?
Not where people assume. In that Italian series, the thumb ligament tears happened mainly on red, intermediate slopes, which accounted for 54.5 percent of them (Festini Capello and colleagues, 2025). And the conditions tell against the idea that this is a bad-weather injury: 66.2 percent of all the accidents in that series happened on well-prepared slopes, 69.2 percent on sunny days, only 4.6 percent in fog or poor visibility and 6.2 percent during snowfall.
Those last four figures cover the whole series of distal upper limb injuries, not the thumb group alone. Better to say so than to borrow them quietly. The direction is still clear enough to be useful: the day this happens is likely to be a good day on a groomed, middling slope, which is most days of most holidays.
What to do before you get off the hill
Two decisions sit here and only the first one is yours to make. The first is whether this needs urgent attention today, and the warning list at the foot of this page sets that out in the page's own order of speed. A thumb that has changed shape, gone numb, turned a different color, or that cracked at the moment it happened goes to an emergency department. So does a hand that is cold or pale. A fall onto the hand that leaves soreness in the hollow at the base of the thumb needs to be seen the same day as well, because a small wrist bone there breaks easily and hides on a first X-ray.
The second decision is the one people get wrong: whether to see somebody at all when the thumb simply hurts and swells. A thumb that feels loose or cannot hold anything between thumb and index finger needs medical advice the same day, and a thumb still painful or swollen more than 2 days after the injury needs to be seen within a day or two of that. How much it hurts does not sort a stretched ligament from a torn one, and a ligament torn right through can look like a mild sprain in the first days.
Stop skiing for the day, and keep that hand off a pole until the thumb has been examined. The force that does this is the pole levering the thumb outward as the hand lands, so another fall on the same hand is the one thing worth going out of your way to avoid, and a tear that has gone right through is not something a splint can undo later. If you cannot ski down safely one handed, ski patrol is who takes you down, and they are also who to tell first if the hand is numb, cold or changing color, because on a mountain they are the route to a clinic and then a hospital rather than the end of it. Do not set off down alone with a hand that is numb, cold or a different color from the other one.
While you are waiting, keep the thumb still and keep it out of the way of a grip. If you strap or tape it yourself, keep it loose enough to slide a finger underneath easily, and take it straight off if the fingers go numb, cold or pale. If somebody fits a splint or a cast, leave that one on, and read the lines in the warning list about a support that feels too tight, because those are the ones that matter in the first 48 hours.
One practical thing people get caught by. If a splint or a cast goes on before you leave, do not drive in it. The NHS trust leaflet cited on this page is blunt about that: driving with the splint on is not allowed, and because the splint is worn full time, it means no driving at all for as long as it is on (St George's University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, 2019). Sort out who is taking the car home before you are standing in the car park with one usable hand.
Do thumb guards, gloves or quick-release straps help?
The honest answer is that nobody has shown it, and that is not the same as saying they are useless. The Italian series recorded that none of its 195 patients had been using protective wrist or thumb supports, and its authors state that specialized gloves with thumb stabilizers and quick-release pole straps have been proposed as preventive measures while targeted kinematic and biomechanical studies are still needed to establish their actual effectiveness (Festini Capello and colleagues, 2025). None of it is permission to keep skiing on a thumb that has already been hurt. A glove or a strap does not take the load off a ligament that is torn, and the next fall arrives in the same direction as the first one.
One piece of equipment did have evidence behind it and is no longer available. The 2019 review reports that ski pole grips with a protective bow across the front can prevent the thumb catching in the snow in a sudden fall, and that these grips are no longer made (Davey and colleagues, 2019).
That leaves one preventive statement with support behind it: ideally, the skier lets go of the pole before hitting the ground (Davey and colleagues, 2019). Whether a person can act on that in the fraction of a second a fall takes is a reasonable thing to doubt, and nobody has tested it as a technique. What should not be said, and is said constantly, is that removing your pole straps prevents this injury. No study we could find compares poles used with straps against poles used without them, and the mechanism that is published is about the hand gripping the pole, not the strap holding it.
Will it heal on its own, and what happens next?
Some of these heal in a splint and some of them do not, and the difference is anatomical, not a matter of toughness. A partial tear usually heals while the thumb is held still. In a complete tear, the torn end can come to rest outside the layer of tissue it needs to heal against, which is known as a Stener lesion, and immobilizing it cannot fix that. Deciding between a splint and an operation is the central question in this injury, and it needs an examination and X-rays, not a wait-and-see week.
What that decision turns on is the examination. Britain's national hand surgery guideline on this injury rests its recommendations on whether the thumb knuckle is significantly loose when a trained clinician stresses it, with X-rays in two planes to look for a fracture or a joint that has shifted out of place. Scans are not routine. A thumb with pain but working function, no looseness on testing and normal X-rays can be sent home with advice on what to watch for, and a thumb that does not meet all three of those goes on to a specialist hand service (British Society for Surgery of the Hand, 2023).
Where the knuckle is significantly loose, surgeons genuinely differ, and the guideline says so rather than picking a side: an early repair and holding the joint still in a rigid cast or thermoplastic splint are both described as reasonable, on very low quality evidence. Its own wording calls Stener lesions controversial as to how often they really occur and how best to treat them, which is one more reason this is an examination question and not a page question. A repair reattaches the torn ligament to the bone it pulled away from, and that reattachment is then the part that has to hold, which is why a thumb that starts to feel loose again after an operation goes back to the surgeon who did it rather than to a physiotherapist. The guideline supports moving the thumb early after a repair, but only when the surgeon judges it safe, so the timing of that comes from the person who operated (British Society for Surgery of the Hand, 2023).
Two limits on all of the above are worth knowing. The guideline covers adults and injuries up to 3 weeks old, and thumb ligament injuries in children were deliberately left outside it, so none of it is written for a child's or a teenager's thumb (British Society for Surgery of the Hand, 2023). In younger children the same fall tends to break the growth plate at the base of the thumb rather than tear the ligament, which is why the warning list below asks for a growing thumb to be seen the same day instead of watched for 2 days. And whatever this page says, the instructions you were given by the team that examined or operated on your thumb come first.
That guideline runs to 60 pages and is written for the clinicians making the surgical decision, not for the person trying to get down a mountain. That gap is where this page sits (British Society for Surgery of the Hand, 2023). The published summary of that guideline sets out its recommendations, and the timeframe our warning list quotes comes from it: the decision about treatment should be made with you within 2 weeks of you first being seen (Dean and colleagues, 2024).
Everything after that decision lives on our condition page, not here. Skier's thumb covers the partial and complete tear distinction, what happens at the appointment, the splint weeks with the evidence behind them, the staged exercises, the old injury that was never treated, and the period after a repair. This page gives no splint duration and no exercises on purpose, because a number quoted out of its context is how people end up doing stage 4 work in week 3.
Where to go next
If the diagnosis has been made, go to skier's thumb and work from there. Before it has been made, read that page but do not start the exercises on it, however mild the thumb feels. The card of related programs lower down this page is a map and not a plan: a stretched ligament and a complete tear get sent in opposite directions, one into a splint and one often into an operating room, and the exercises belong to whichever of the two you turn out to have. If nobody has named it yet and the soreness sits around the base of the thumb instead of the knuckle, pain at the base of the thumb sorts the causes, which include several that have nothing to do with a fall.
The same fall often does two things at once. A wrist that took the weight and is now sore and swollen belongs with wrist sprain, and a wrist that has been confirmed broken with wrist fracture rehab. If you also hit your head, the lines at the foot of this page come first, whatever the thumb is doing.
For the sport as a whole, including what else skiing and ice hockey do to a body and how they differ, start at the ice hockey and skiing injuries hub. If the same fall twisted your knee, ski and hockey knee injury is the page for that.
Who to see, and when
Same day, if the thumb feels unstable or cannot pinch. Within a day or two, if it is still painful and swollen more than 2 days after the fall. Those two sentences are most of the triage, and they do not change because you have four days of a holiday left. Four things sit above them, all on the warning list: a hand or fingers that are cold, pale, blue or numb, a thumb that has changed shape or cracked, a sore spot in the hollow at the base of the thumb after landing on the hand, and a growing child's or teenager's thumb. Each of those goes faster than the two sentences above.
Ask to be examined by someone who looks at hands. A hand therapist, a hand clinic or a physiotherapist with hand experience will test the knuckle in the direction the injury happened, which is what separates a stretched ligament from a torn one, and will say whether X-rays are needed. If the thumb has already been splinted somewhere else, take the splint and whatever paperwork came with it, because the duration on it is a clinical decision and not a standard figure: one NHS trust leaflet on this injury leaves the splint duration as a blank line for the therapist to complete.
Then ask what you may and may not do with the rest of the week, and get it in plain terms: which movements, which grips, and whether a pole is allowed at all. The warning signs below come first, at whatever speed each line sets.
Related exercise programs
Warning signs
Get emergency help now
- Emergency: your arm, hand or fingers turn cold, pale, blue or gray compared with the other side. Call emergency services or go to an emergency department straight away, and do not drive yourself. The blood supply to the arm may be blocked.
- Emergency: after a fall or injury to the thumb, your hand is numb, tingles or has pins and needles, the thumb has changed color, changed shape or sits at an odd angle, or you heard a crack. The same applies to a bone showing through the skin or a cut that is bleeding heavily. Go to an emergency department or call emergency services straight away, and do not drive yourself. The thumb may be broken or out of place.
- Emergency: you cannot remember the fall that hurt your thumb or how it happened. Go to an emergency department straight away, and do not drive yourself. You may have blacked out or hit your head without knowing it.
- Emergency: after a knock to the head, being very drowsy or finding it hard to keep your eyes open, confusion, a fit (seizure), new weakness or numbness anywhere in your body, new trouble understanding, speaking, walking or keeping your balance, new problems seeing or hearing, clear fluid coming from your ears or nose, bleeding from your ears or bruising behind them, a black eye when your eye was not hit, a dent in your head or a wound with something stuck in it, or a change in behavior. Call emergency services straight away. These can be signs of an injury to the brain.
- Emergency: a knock to the head in a high-energy accident, even if you feel completely well. That means a fall from a height of more than 1 meter (about 3 feet) or more than 5 stairs, a crash at high speed, a car that rolled over, being thrown from a vehicle, being hit by a vehicle while walking or cycling, a bike crash, an accident on a quad bike or similar motorized vehicle, a fall from a horse, a diving accident, or any other heavy, fast impact to the head. Call emergency services straight away, without waiting to see how you feel. A high-energy head injury is a reason for emergency assessment on its own, with no symptoms needed.
- Emergency: after a knock to the head, you were knocked out, even for a moment, you cannot remember what happened just before or after, you have had a headache ever since, or you are being sick (vomiting). The same applies, even if you feel fine, if you take medicine that thins your blood, other than aspirin on its own, have a bleeding or clotting condition, have had brain surgery in the past, or had been drinking alcohol or taking drugs when it happened. Go to an emergency department straight away, and do not drive yourself.
- Emergency: severe neck pain after a knock to the head, whatever the fall or the knock was like. Keep still and call emergency services, and do not let anyone move you until someone trained has checked your neck. If the neck pain only starts later and nobody has checked your neck since, go to an emergency department straight away, and do not drive yourself.
- Emergency: after a knock to the head, swelling, a deep cut or severe pain at the exact spot that was hit. Call emergency services or go to an emergency department straight away, and do not drive yourself. These can be signs of a broken skull.
- Emergency: while you are in a cast or splint, your fingers turn blue, white or pale, or feel cold. Do not wait to see if raising your hand helps. Go to an emergency department straight away, and do not drive yourself. The cast or splint may be cutting off the blood supply, or pressure may be building up inside the forearm (compartment syndrome), and both need checking quickly.
- Emergency: while you are wearing a wrist support or a compression wrap that you put on yourself, your fingers turn white, pale or blue, or feel cold. Take it off at once, and if the color and the feeling do not come straight back, go to an emergency department straight away, and do not drive yourself. Do not wait to see whether raising your hand helps, because a hand held higher than your heart gets less blood rather than more. A support or wrap that is too tight can press on the blood supply to the hand.
- Emergency: the pain in your hand, thumb or forearm keeps getting worse rather than easing and is far worse than the injury looks, the hand or forearm feels tight and hard, or your fingers go numb or you cannot move them. This applies even if you have no cast, splint or wrap on at all. Go to an emergency department straight away, and do not drive yourself. Rest the hand at about the level of your heart while you get there, do not raise it higher and do not put ice on it, because if pressure is building up inside the hand or forearm both of those cut down the blood reaching it. If you take medicine that thins your blood, other than aspirin on its own, do not wait at all.
- Emergency: a thumb or finger that becomes swollen along its length, red, hot and tender, and hurts a lot when you try to straighten it, so you keep it slightly bent, or a palm that becomes red, hot and swollen, especially after a cut, splinter, bite, injection or operation on the hand. Go to an emergency department straight away, and do not wait to see if it settles. An infection in the sheath around the tendon can spread quickly and often needs antibiotics through a drip and an operation. If you have a very high or very low temperature, shivering you cannot control, you are breathing very fast or finding it hard to breathe, you are confused or your speech is slurred, your skin, lips or tongue look blue, gray, pale or blotchy (on brown or black skin this can be easier to see on the palms of the hands or soles of the feet), or you have a rash that does not fade when you press it, call emergency services, as this can be sepsis.
Get help now, day or night
- In a dressing, splint or cast on your hand or wrist, or in a wrist support or compression wrap you put on yourself, the pain gets worse, your fingers feel numb or tingle or look more swollen, or it feels too tight. Take off anything you put on yourself. Leave a dressing, splint or cast your team fitted on, and do not cut it or unwrap it. Stop, rest your hand at about the level of your heart, keep moving your fingers and contact your surgical team or get medical advice straight away. Do not lift the hand higher than your heart and do not put ice on it, because if pressure is building up inside the forearm both of those cut down the blood reaching it. If you cannot move your fingers, the pain is severe even after painkillers, or the numbness, tingling or swelling has not settled within 30 minutes, go to an emergency department straight away, and do not drive yourself.
Get help today
- Same day: you have had a knock to the head and you take aspirin on its own, without any of the emergency signs above. Get medical advice the same day. Aspirin on its own is the only blood thinning medicine left out of the emergency line above, and the NHS still asks anybody taking a medicine that thins the blood to get urgent advice after a head injury.
- Same day: your cast or splint feels too loose or uncomfortable, cracks, softens, gets wet or itches badly. Ring your fracture clinic, plaster room or surgical team and ask to be seen, and go to an emergency department if they cannot see you that day. A cast or splint that has gone loose or soft may no longer be holding the thumb still, and holding it still is the treatment.
- Same day: the injured thumb belongs to a child or teenager who is still growing. Get them seen by a doctor the same day rather than watching the thumb for 2 days, and say how the fall happened. A growing thumb does not fail the way an adult's does. In a four-year series of 302 skier's thumbs at a Swiss ski hospital, 24 of them, 8 percent, were in children whose growth plates were still open, and in the younger children the injury was a break through the growth plate at the base of the thumb, while the teenagers had the adult pattern of avulsion fractures and torn ligaments (Berger and colleagues, 1993). The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons says a possible growth plate injury should be seen by a doctor as soon as it can be, because a child's bone heals fast and needs to be in the right position before it does, and it adds that some of these breaks cannot be seen on a first X-ray. So keep any follow-up appointment even if the thumb feels better, and keep them off skiing and off sport until they have been checked.
- Same day: the thumb knuckle feels loose or unstable, gives way when you pinch or grip, or you cannot hold anything between your thumb and index finger. Get medical advice the same day, ask to be examined, and say how the injury happened. Keep the thumb in whatever support you were given and leave the exercises out until you have been seen. A ligament torn right through is treated differently from one that is stretched, and the UK hand surgery guideline asks for the decision about treatment to be made with you within 2 weeks of you first being seen (Dean and colleagues, 2024). This line is for a thumb that has not been operated on. If you have had this ligament repaired, the next line below is the one for you, because it sends you to the team that did the operation rather than to general medical advice.
- Same day: since a repair of the thumb ligament, the knuckle starts to feel loose again or wobbly, gives way when you pinch or grip, or you can no longer hold anything between the thumb and index finger. This is the post-operative version of the line above. Keep the splint or cast on, leave the exercises out, and ask the team that operated on your thumb to see you the same day. A repair can pull away from the bone it was fixed to, and whether the thumb now needs holding differently or repairing again is a decision for the surgeon who did it rather than something to work out from a page.
- Same day: after a fall onto your hand, pain, swelling or tenderness on the thumb side of the wrist, especially in the small hollow at the base of the thumb that shows when you give a thumbs-up (the anatomical snuffbox). Leave the exercises out and keep weight off that hand until it has been checked. Get medical advice the same day, even if it feels like a mild sprain, and ask about an X-ray. It can be hard to tell a broken wrist from a bad sprain, and a break in the small wrist bone on the thumb side (scaphoid) does not always show on the first X-ray. If your doctor still suspects one, you may wear a splint or cast and have a repeat X-ray or a scan, so keep that appointment even if the wrist feels better. A missed scaphoid break can fail to heal.
- Same day: the thumb is hot, red and swollen, or you have thumb pain with a high temperature or feel hot, cold or shivery. Get medical advice the same day, and go to an emergency department if you feel very unwell. Redness can be harder to see on brown or black skin. This can be a sign of infection in the joint, which needs treatment quickly. If you feel hot and shivery or unwell with it, use the infection and sepsis line on this page.
- Same day: you blacked out before the fall that hurt your thumb and nobody has checked why. Get medical advice the same day. A blackout needs its own check, especially if you are over 65 or it came without warning.
- The thumb hurts at night or at rest and the pain keeps getting worse rather than easing as the weeks go by. If you are being treated for cancer now, contact your cancer team the same day.
Book an appointment
- Within a day or two: the pain and swelling are still there more than 2 days after the injury, or the thumb is not clearly getting better. See a doctor even if the sprain seemed mild. The 2 days is OrthoInfo's own figure: it advises seeing a doctor if the pain and swelling carry on for more than 48 hours, and it says a mild thumb sprain still needs a doctor to look at it if it does not improve quickly. A ligament torn right through can look like a mild sprain in the first days and is treated differently.
- Within a few days: a thumb injured weeks or months ago that is still weak, aches at the knuckle or gives way when you pinch. See a doctor or ask about a hand specialist within a few days rather than waiting longer. An old tear can still be treated, often by rebuilding the ligament with a tendon graft, and a review of the published cases found results after that were about as good as after an early repair, although nearly all those studies were small and low quality (Samora and colleagues, 2013).
- Since the injury or an operation on your hand, the hand is getting more painful rather than less, the skin becomes very sensitive to light touch, or the hand changes color, temperature, swelling or sweating compared with the other one, or looks shiny. See your doctor or physio as soon as you can, within a few days at most, as this can be complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) and early treatment may help.
- The thumb hurts at night or at rest and the pain keeps getting worse rather than easing as the weeks go by. If you have had cancer, now or in the past, or are losing weight without trying, see your doctor sooner, within a day or two, and mention it. This applies even if the pain is not getting worse.
- The thumb hurts at night or at rest and the pain keeps getting worse rather than easing as the weeks go by. See your doctor within a few days.
Common questions
Will skier's thumb heal on its own?
It depends entirely on whether the ligament is stretched, partly torn or torn right through, and that is the one thing you cannot judge from how it feels: a partial tear usually does heal while the thumb is held still. A complete tear can leave the torn end sitting outside the sheet of tissue it should heal against, which is called a Stener lesion, and no amount of time in a splint fixes that, which is why the splint or operate decision is the whole safety point of this injury. What settles it is how loose the knuckle is when somebody examines it, not how sore it is. Where the examination finds the thumb significantly loose, the UK hand surgery guideline says that holding the joint still in a rigid cast or splint and repairing the ligament are both reasonable, and that you and your clinician should reach that decision together within 2 weeks of you first being seen (Dean and colleagues, 2024). So waiting to see what happens is the one approach with a real cost attached. Skier's thumb sets out the difference between the two injuries, what happens at the appointment and the healing times, with an honest account of how good that evidence is.
Does a ski pole strap cause it?
The strap is blamed more than the evidence supports, and the distinction matters because people act on it. What is published is that the hand lands while still gripping the pole, with the pole able to act as a lever that forces the thumb further out (Davey and colleagues, 2019), and that the thumb ligament injuries in a two-season Italian series were often related to the pole catching in a fall (Festini Capello and colleagues, 2025). Neither of those separates the strap from the grip, and no study found for this page compared skiing with straps against skiing without them, so nobody can tell you that dropping the straps prevents this injury. The one preventive statement with support behind it is about the pole and not the strap: the review says the skier should ideally let go of the pole before hitting the ground. Whether anyone can act on that in the middle of a fall is a fair question, and no study we could find has tested it.
Do thumb guards or reinforced gloves help?
Nobody has shown that they do. The Italian series of 195 distal upper limb injuries recorded that not one of those patients had been using protective wrist or thumb supports, and the authors state plainly that specialized gloves with thumb stabilizers and quick-release pole straps have been proposed as preventive measures but that targeted kinematic and biomechanical studies are still needed to establish whether they work (Festini Capello and colleagues, 2025). There is one piece of equipment with evidence behind it and you cannot buy it: the 2019 review reports that pole grips with a protective bow across the front could stop the thumb catching in the snow during a sudden fall, and that those grips are no longer made (Davey and colleagues, 2019). Two of the pages that rank for this injury are selling thumb braces. Neither of them tells you that.
Can I keep skiing with it?
That is a decision for whoever examines the thumb, and the reason this page will not give you a number is that the sources do not have one. The Australian Physiotherapy Association's consumer page on this injury says taping or splinting for sport may be needed for several weeks or for the rest of the season depending on the grade, which is clinical advice from a named physiotherapist and not a study, and it is the only source found for this page that addresses the question at all. One of the NHS trust leaflets on this injury leaves the splint duration as a blank line for the therapist to fill in, which tells you how individual that decision is. Before any of that, the thumb has to be graded: a thumb that feels loose or cannot pinch needs medical advice the same day, and a complete tear is not something to ski on while you wait. Where the examination does find the knuckle significantly loose and the plan is to treat it without an operation, the UK guideline's instruction is a rigid cast or thermoplastic splint rather than tape or a soft support (British Society for Surgery of the Hand, 2023), and the same trust leaflet that leaves the duration blank has that splint worn full time, kept dry in the shower, and rules out driving while it is on (St George's University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, 2019). If the ligament has been repaired, the date you can ski again is the operating surgeon's to give and nobody else's.
References
- Davey A, Endres NK, Johnson RJ, Shealy JE. Alpine Skiing Injuries. Sports Health. 2019;11(1):18-26. https://doi.org/10.1177/1941738118813051
- Festini Capello MP, Bizzotto N, Qordja F, Misselwitz S, Sernia C, Gioitta Iachino S, Petralia G, van Es VAA, Indelli PF, Schaller C. Distal Upper Limb Injuries in Skiing and Snowboarding: A Two-Season Study from a High-Volume Trauma Center in the Italian Dolomites. Medicina (Kaunas). 2025;61(10):1787. https://doi.org/10.3390/medicina61101787
- British Society for Surgery of the Hand. Evidence based management of adults with acute ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) of the thumb injuries. BSSH Evidence for Surgical Treatment (BEST). April 2023. https://www.bssh.ac.uk/_userfiles/pages/files/professionals/BEST%20Guidelines/BEST%20UCL%20Final.pdf
- Dean B, Rodrigues J, Riley N, et al. Guideline on managing thumb ulnar collateral ligament injuries: the British Society of Surgery for the Hand Evidence for Surgical Treatment (BEST) findings and recommendations. Journal of Hand Surgery (European Volume). 2024;49(10):1195-1201. https://doi.org/10.1177/17531934241274612
- Dickson TJ, Terwiel FA. Injury trends in alpine skiing and a snowboarding over the decade 2008-09 to 2017-18. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport. 2021;24(10):1055-1060. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsams.2020.12.001
- St George's University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Thumb Ulnar Collateral Ligament (UCL) Injury. April 2019. https://www.stgeorges.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/UCL-injury.pdf
- Australian Physiotherapy Association. Skier's thumb. choose.physio. Clinical content contributed by APA physiotherapist Karen Fitt. https://content.choose.physio/node/326
- American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Sprained thumb. OrthoInfo. https://www.orthoinfo.org/en/diseases--conditions/sprained-thumb/
- American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Scaphoid fracture of the wrist. OrthoInfo. https://www.orthoinfo.org/en/diseases--conditions/scaphoid-fracture-of-the-wrist/
- American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Growth plate fractures. OrthoInfo. https://www.orthoinfo.org/en/diseases--conditions/growth-plate-fractures/
- Berger C, Holzach P, Matter P. [Skier's thumb injury in the child]. Zeitschrift fur Unfallchirurgie und Versicherungsmedizin. 1993;Suppl 1:222-231. PMID 8123333. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8123333/
- Samora JB, Harris JD, Griesser MJ, Ruff ME, Awan HM. Outcomes after injury to the thumb ulnar collateral ligament: a systematic review. Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine. 2013;23(4):247-254. https://doi.org/10.1097/JSM.0b013e318289c6ff
- NHS. Sprains and strains. Page last reviewed 23 April 2024. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/sprains-and-strains/
- NHS. Broken finger. Page last reviewed 20 November 2025. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/broken-finger/
- NHS. Head injury and concussion. Page last reviewed 29 May 2025. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/head-injury-and-concussion/
- National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). Head injury: assessment and early management. NICE guideline NG232. Published 18 May 2023. https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng232
- NHS. Sepsis. Page last reviewed 14 May 2026. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/sepsis/
Written and checked by the PocketPhysio editorial team. Last updated 2026-11-06.
This page is general education, not a diagnosis or a personal treatment plan. See a physiotherapist or doctor for advice about your own situation.