The proper care and feeding of calluses

[Khronos8]

Important (to me at least) question: how do I care for the calluses on my hands to keep them from tearing off when I Deadlift?

background: I finally decided to try a powerlifting meet. As part of the training for this meet I've been working on getting a realistic feel for my non-strap-using Deadlift max. The past couple of training sessions I've had to cut short each time because I've ripped the callus at the base of the ring finger on my left hand.

Question: Any advice out there on what I can do to prevent this from happening again?

I trim my calluses (more like shaving them down) every week with a very sharp blade, and if I had time to let it heal completely I might be able to just maintain with this. But now this one has torn twice, which doesn't bode well for actually attempting a real max: each time I had to stop short of what I thought I could do because, as I was working up to max, the damn thing would rip, then there was no way I could hold onto the bar well enough to execute the lift. Meet is Sept 12. I'd really like to have at least one real max effort under my belt before I walk in there.

Khronos8

[Proper Knob]

One simple thing for me which work very well is a good quality hand cream. That's not a joke. I found that when I was going to the gym very frequently and using a lot of chalk my entire hands would become dry. I've used a hand cream to remedy this for years, as a result I very, very rarely have issues with calluses.

[Matt Z]

Stop trimming them. Try using a nail file to sand down the rough edges.