Today we’re gonna be talking about your hands and how much they can impact on your wrist, your elbow, your shoulder. And I’m gonna give you a few simple exercises that I think are absolutely fantastic for making your hands more relaxed, more sensitive, able to do more things with more coordination.
So whenever we start talking about the hands, most people think, okay, well, I already trained my hands. I do some grip strength work. I hang from bars. I’m always using them throughout the day. And that’s true. But one of the issues that we often run into is that that amount of work can often lead to some degree of imbalance and often what I call unconscious hand tension, meaning once you go through the exercises I’m about to show you, you may start to realize how much tension you’re carrying in your hands all day, every day.
So these are pretty simple, but they are quite intense. So what I want to do first is I want to make sure that we do a little bit of a warmup. So I’m just going to have you put your hands out, and I want you to start doing some massage through the thumb side, the little finger side, a little bit of work in between the bones. Spend maybe five to 15 seconds, you know, moving through.
Do that on both sides. Once you’ve done that, you’re going to interlace your fingers and you’re just going to gently rotate them back and forth, getting a little bit of rotational motion at the end, and then actually change that. So if you’re interlaced this way, I then want you to interlace this way and repeat. And you’ll notice you get a little bit of a different stretching sensation.
And as you’re doing this, you can try and do it with the wrist mostly in neutral. You can also come out here and get a little bit more wrist extension, and that’s going to give you a different feel. Now, once we’ve done that, we want to do the same thing. Just working through the forearms, pretty much everything that controls a lot of the major functions of our hand. Our muscles are going to insert all the way up at the elbow. So these guys are intimately connected.
Very often when you have tennis elbow issues or golfer’s elbows, pain problems, bursitis of the elbow, et cetera, we can trace a lot of that back to improper hand usage or excessive usage. So I like to, again, just to kind of warm up the skin with some rotational motion, a little bit of traction down, traction up medial and lateral. You can then do a little bit of massage through the musculature. You’re going to do that on both sides.
Overall, I would say one to two minutes per arm and make sure everything is good and warmed up. Now from here, we’re gonna do a quick test. All that I want you to do is put your arms down by your side. Your fingers are facing directly forward. I want you to look down and I want you to flex your wrist.
So pull your palms toward your body as far as you can. And I just want you to compare side to side. So look to see how much range of motion do I have? And more importantly, how does it feel? Does one side feel really tight? Does the other side feel pretty comfortable? Once we’ve done that, we’re then going to reverse it and we’re going to go into extension.
And you’re again self checking, trying to get an idea of am I relatively symmetric and how uncomfortable is it? I would like for you to then at that point, repeat that with the arm straight out in front of you. So make sure you’re in a nice tall position. And again, you’re going to flex and extend. And you’re just doing some comparison. A lot of people will find that as they get into that extended elbow position that if they have a problematic side, they will begin to lose either extension or flexion range of motion.
Okay, so now we kind of have a basic idea of where we’re at. I want to do one more kind of pretest and then we’re going to get into the exercises. So after we’ve done our basic test here, we’re then going to go into this position. You’re going to put your hands together, beginning at the bottom of your palms, bring them together, mesh them together so that your thumb is almost touching your chest.
And then I want you to drive down as far as you comfortably can while still keeping the bottom of the hand, palms together. Again, notice what your range of motion is, how much extension and how does that feel side to side? Okay, we’re going to retest that after we’ve done these exercise progressions. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to work on the space between your fingers.
This is actually very easy procedure, but it can be quite intense. So we’re going to begin this with your elbow bent. The easiest way to do this is we’re going to start between your little finger and ring finger. I want you to take two fingers of your opposite hand and dig them in. Alright, get all the way down into the space. Now once you’re there, you’re going to squeeze.
You’re going to try to squeeze your fingers together. Squeeze the fingers that are in that space for 10 seconds. And then at the end of that 10 seconds, you’re now going to try to separate them. So pull them away, trying to make it to the point that they don’t touch these intervening fingers for 10 seconds and relax. And then we’re going to repeat that. We’re going to go between the ring finger and middle finger.
Again, squeeze for ten. I’m not going to hold it for that whole period of time. And then separate, separate, separate, separate. And then we’re going to repeat that here. And then finally, we’re going to work between the index finger and thumb. We’re going to be working on this motion. So you can typically get away with two fingers with a squeeze, but depending on the size of your hand, you may need three.
So again, we’re going to squeeze here, hold for 10 seconds, and then separate out. Try to open up that space. All right? And we’re going to relax. We’re then going to repeat that on the opposite side. Now, once you’ve gone through that on both hands, you have two more rounds of this to go. Because if you notice when I was demonstrating that, although I had my, my wrist a little bit extended to show it to the camera, what I would generally have you do is initiate this exercise with your palm facing the center of your body, and you would be working it like this, just in this position.
The reason that I want you to do it in this position is that this is going to be our neutral position. We’re then going to repeat it with our wrist flex.ed, so our palm pointing toward our body. Right. And we’re just going to go through that same process again. And then we’re going to go into wrist extension and we’re going to go through that same process again. Now, if you’re feeling exceptionally adventurous, you can then repeat that same process with the arm fully extended.
So I would be working here, here, all the way through, and then in my flex position, in my extended position, turn off the video or pause it for a few minutes and work through all of these positions again, focusing on a ten second hold and then a ten second separation in between each of the fingers. At the end of that, as you just let your arms drop and relax, your hands are going to feel probably remarkably different.
The big question is, how did it impact your overall range of motion? You know, if you have wrist issues, elbow issues, shoulder issues, how did it impact that? So what we’re gonna do now is we’re gonna do a little reassessment. You’re gonna come back to that same test that we did before, where you’re looking at your flexion, you’re looking at your extension. You do that with the arms fully extended, elbows locked, and then finally, you’ll go back to this position here.
Some people call it a prayer position, where we’re gonna palms together, fingers all together, close to the body, thumbs touching the chest, and Then driving all the way down. In a lot of cases, what you’re gonna find is that not only do you get more range of motion, but you get more range of motion with far more comfort.
I recommend that you keep this process in mind because you don’t have to go through every iteration I just showed you. But throughout the day, if you can take just a couple of minutes and work through it, it is remarkable how impressively it will relax your hands if you spend a ton of time on the keyboard. You’re always texting, you’re working out really hard, you’re doing grip strength work, you’re doing pull ups and whatever. Again, most of the time we’re over utilizing our flexors. We start to lose balance in our hands, and they become more and more claw like and more, more tension filled that will echo through your elbow, through your shoulder, all the way up to your neck, through the rest of your body.
And neurologically speaking, whenever we look at brain structure, an enormous amount of brain space is devoted to the hands. This is because these are implements that we use throughout our lives. They have to be coordinated. They also have to be strong. So often what we see is that the brain will go with the more simple approach, which is create tension to create strength, and we begin to lose dexterity.
So I find that working on these exercises not only builds more mobility, it also does build strength in areas that are typically ignored. So I’m going to highly recommend that you start including these in your day to day routine. If you’re new to Z Health, we are a brain based education company. We specialize in working with doctors, coaches, and therapists from all over the world. We have about 12,000 coaches in over 110 countries.
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