Pain, stiffness or weakness in your hands and wrists is very common. It can have a significant impact on your daily life from typing on your keyboard to swinging a racket. With the right treatment and prescribed exercises you can help improve the strength and range of motion in your hands.
Here are some critical hand and wrist exercises to help improve hand mobility.
Weight Bearing Wrist Press
This is an essential stretch for athletes that are heavily dependent on wrist strength and mobility, such as gymnasts and climbers. It is also very good at relieving symptoms associated with carpel tunnel syndrome and improving loading tolerance in the wrist.
Start by spreading your fingers and firmly planting your thumb on a bench/stool/chair facing forward. Make sure that the surface isn’t too high, your arms should be straight.
Begin to load the wrists by pulling the elbows in and release.
Complete 3-5 reps of this movement pattern with your hands facing forward, outward, backwards and inwards.
You can control the amount of weight by shifting your body weight forward or backwards.
You should never feel pain in your wrists or pinching in your wrists.
Banded Digit Abduction and Extension
The Banded Digit Abduction and Extension is a super practical exercise to help improve grip strength. A great exercise to incorporate into prehab routines for climbers and gymnasts, but also for day-to-day living (hard time opening that jar of pickles?)
If you don’t have a resistance band handy (no pun intended), you can also use a hair elastic.
Wrap the band around your hand and pull it tight to create resistance.
Slowly stretch your hand out and then contract in back into a relaxed position.
Repeat 10-12 times or until fatigue.
Weighted Wrist Rollouts
Weighted Wrist Rollouts can help rebuild tendon strength and specifically, the eccentric (lowering) phase can be used to rehab tennis and golf elbow.
For this exercise you can use a weighted band or small hand weight. It is important to keep your forearm down on your thighs so that your elbow doesn’t lift up in order.
With the back of your forearm resting on your thigh and weight in hand, slowly roll out your wrist. When it is at the bottom, slowly roll the weight back up.
You can also rotate your arm and do the reverse movement by lifting the weight up with your wrist and slowly releasing it back down.
Lastly, you can use your other hand to help with the up phase of the exercises will give more load for tendon regeneration.
Complete 3-4 sets of 12 or to fatigue.
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