Dr George Best: Hello! I'm Dr. George Best, of Best Health and Wellness, in San Antonio, Texas. And in this video I'm going to be demonstrating some exercises for the hands that can be beneficial for a variety of hand and wrist problems, such as arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome.
So, let me start by saying that the first exercise that I'm going to demonstrate and the first exercise that most people recommend for someone with hand and wrist problems is a gripping type of exercise, which I'll be coming to in just a moment.
And I want to start by saying that I don't recommend doing a grip strengthening exercise for most people. The reason why is that the typical person actually does quite a bit of gripping and grasping with their hands throughout the course of a normal day. The muscles involved in gripping are usually quite strong and in fact, a lot of times people start to develop hand problems because their grip strength, is maybe getting a little bit too strong, in things they are kind of pulling forward in the hand, and you're getting tightness in those muscles thus preventing full range of motion in the joints. This leads to problems such as arthritis.
So, for those people who are kind of around the extreme ends of the spectrum, those who need a lot of hand strength for certain activities, such as perhaps a message therapist, who has to do a lot of really intense work with their hands, maybe somebody who is a rock climber, they need extremely strong fingers for that activity, or for people on the other extreme end of the spectrum, where they are extremely weak for one reason or another.
For instance somebody who may have had a fracture in their hand and wrist have been on a cast, they may have had a lot of muscle atrophy and for them, then doing the grip strengthening exercises is definitely a good idea.
Other people who fall under this category maybe somebody who is older and just has been very inactive, and they have lost a lot of muscle strength just plain old due to inactivity and they maybe having difficulty doing things like opening jars or something like that.
In those cases, then yes, doing a grip strengthening is a good idea, but for anybody who is in between and they are just having some problems with stiffness in their hands, maybe some carpal tunnel syndrome. I don't really recommend doing a lot of grip strengthening exercises. There are some other exercises that are much more beneficial that I'll be showing you on this video.
For the grip strengthening exercises, you don't really need anything special. I have actually just using a rolled up pair of socks for this demonstration and I'll show you a couple of other things that you can do if you like. But you don't need anything special. What I do recommend is you choose something that's equivalent to what your hand strength is, this would be kind of a medium strength type of exercise, using a rolled up sock.
If you're very weak, if you don't have much strength at all in your hands then you could use something like maybe a damp sponge, just a regular kitchen sponge will work just fine. A Nerf ball, those types of things work really well for people with really weak hands, or may be a piece of foam rubber or something like that.
The grip exercise is very straight forward. You probably already know what to do. You're just going to grasp whatever object you're going to use and you just want something that has got some grip to it, some squishiness to it and you're just going to squeeze and release. So, squeeze and release multiple times.
A lot of people say, well how many repetitions should I do?
Well, what I recommend you do is if you're trying to really strengthen up these muscles, you want to actually get to the point where you feel just a slight burning in the forearm area and the muscles in the front of the forearm. So, as you go, and that may take anywhere from a few reputations if you're weak, up to maybe 20, 30, 40, 50 or even more reputations if you're stronger.
So you can just use, whatever you're using will also factor into how fast it takes to develop that burning in the front of the forearm.
Now, if you're stronger, you can use something like a tennis ball or a racket ball because you're going to have a lot more resistance on them and you can squeeze pretty hard on this without getting a whole lot of compression of it.
You can also use one of those spring-loaded hand grip exercisers, but you don't need anything fancy like that, just one of your tennis ball or racket ball will work just fine.
Now, one of the things that you can do regardless of how much resistance you're using is you can either do just a straight squeeze with the whole hand type of activity or you can actually squeeze one finger at a time. This will actually give you a lot more strengthening overall, I think in most cases, than just doing the general grip, because there is a tendency to use those stronger muscles when you're doing the whole hand at same time. So, if you individually squeeze, you will get quite a bit more of an effect in your grip strengthening exercise.
Okay and as I said, there are a lot of cases where people are actually getting too much strength in the grip muscles of the hand. And what's happening is those muscles are becoming overly tight and they are not really getting whole lot of movement through the full range motion of their hand. They are moving kind of in a limited range. They never really get their hand spread apart.
So, in this next exercise I'm going to show you, you will need some hi-tech exercise equipment, such as this rubber band right here. So, you will find a rubber band and come back the video.
Now, for this next exercise as I said, you'll need a rubber band to do it. And I recommend one about that size, where it's going to have a little bit of thickness to it. If you're really weak, you can use one that's a thinner type of band. But this is a good one for the average person to start with.
As you get stronger, you can actually double over the rubber band or you can get those rubber bands that they use for holding broccoli stalks together in a grocery store. You can get your hi-tech exercise equipment and get some healthy food at the same time.
So, what you're going to do is you're just going to slide the rubber band over the ends of your fingers just like so. And you're going to spread your fingers apart slowly. Now, the rubber band may have a little tendency to roll on you and a lot of times if you go too fast, it will actually go up on to the hand like so. So, you want to be slow and steady with it so that you don't have that rolling and even then it will roll somewhat as this one is wanting to do on me.
So, you want to get them close to the ends of the fingers, and just open the hand apart against the resistance of the rubber band. You can see I worked the whole hand that way. As with the grip exercise, people ask, well, how many of these should I do? And in this case, you want to have the burning in the back of the forearm. So, up in the muscles, in the back of the forearm, when you've been doing this long enough and again, it'll vary depending on the size of the rubber band you're using and also your strength, how long it'll take before you start to get burning in here. And so when you get that burning, then you have done enough for that day.
I have a lot of people who'll do this when they're watching television, sometimes when you're driving in the car, so this is something that you can do quite a bit of. This is a great exercise for people who have stiffness in their fingers. For people who are developing carpel tunnel syndrome. Because one other things that it does is, not only are you strengthening the muscles in the back of the fingers and back of the hand, but you're also stretching the hand and wrist soft tissues as you do this.
The carpel tunnel is right in here and as you stretch, you're actually going to stretch some of that soft tissue and open up some space in there. In addition, you're going to stretch the joints and the soft tissues on the front of the hand and a lot of times this will help you develop a lot more limber fingers, so that you can actually move your fingers easier and have less pain in the knuckles and in the joints. So that's a very good exercise for almost any type of hand or wrist problem.
One last thing I want to cover before I sign off is how frequently to do these exercises? We talked about doing the exercises to the point where you start to feel a little bit burning in the muscles and that's usually a good indicator of how much you need to do to be able to get the strengthening and stability that you want.
But how frequently is another story. In most cases, I recommend doing these every other day, not everyday. The reason why is you want to have a little bit time for the muscles to recover and rebuild. Anytime you're doing strengthening exercises, you want to give the muscles a day in between to give them a little bit of a chance for recovering. So, every other day, three days a week is usually a good type of program for who doing these types of exercises.
If you're involved in an activity on a daily basis where your hands are really getting a lot of work and especially doing gripping activities, then I would actually recommend doing that hand extension exercise with the rubber band on a daily basis to kind of counter in the effects of what is happening just with your normal activities.
But other than that, in most cases I would say, three days a week, every other day is the way to go with these types of exercises.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services