The hand exercises I will show you work to strengthen the muscles in hand, increase blood flow to the hands, and stretch the hands. For some reason, most people forget how important the hand is despite people using them extensively. As people age, their hands become incredibly tight, which results in the deterioration of these muscles and soreness in these areas. These exercises will combat this development, and for those who are not at that stage yet, these exercises will help you open up your hands and unlock your hands’ lost potential.
I recently began focusing more on reducing tightness and strengthening the foot and hands. After doing this for the last few weeks, I have felt amazing. As you may know, the hands and feet have the most bones, nerves, and muscles in the body. A significant amount of your hands and feet connect to areas in the brain. A type of science called reflexology believes that areas of the feet and hand connect to places throughout the body and your brain. By unlocking your hands’ potential, you could enhance your brain and help other areas of your body. The body’s connectivity makes me believe it is accurate, and the fact that I have felt great recently increases my belief in the ideas. Even if this is not true, you use your hand and feet extensively, and performing exercises and loosening these areas can help you dramatically. This blog will focus exclusively on hand exercises, but I will be discussing foot exercises shortly.
The exercises will be found from a youtube video from Invigorate Physical Therapy, and Wellness called “7 Helpful Hand Exercises for Parkinson’s (to Improve Handwriting, Flexibility, and Dexterity.” The video will help you visualize my description, and I will include ways that can make the exercise more challenging. I will stress that you should try to reach a point of exhaustion and muscle soreness in the areas. You may not be able to do all the exercises when you initially start, but as you do more of the exercises, I am certain that your hand will feel so much better.
- Tight fists by your chest to extension
- One important thing to do is to extend your hands as much as possible by using all the muscles in your back, shoulder, arm, and hands. You do this by taking your arms back as far as possible and pushing your arms out as much as you can. Additionally, when you clench your hands, clench them as tightly as possible to use as many hand muscles as you can.
- Finger taps to the thumb
- For this exercise, you will tap all of your fingers to your thumb. To make this exercise even difficult, I hold each of my fingers to my thumbs as tightly as possible. After touching the fingers together, extend the fingers as far as you can by utilizing the strength in the hand muscles.
- Finger Extensions with Wrist movement down and up
- For this exercise, move your hands down as far as you can extend your fingers and hands when you are coming back up. With this exercise, I like to hold my hands at the peak of my stretch for five seconds. When I am at that point, I will try to use all my muscles in my body to stretch my hands even more.
- Arm and Hand Twists
- You will place your arms straight in front of your body slightly below shoulder level for this exercise. With the arms extended as far as possible, rotate your shoulder, arms, and hands in both directions. At the end of each direction, hold that position for an extra five seconds and try to utilize your muscles to rotate even further.
- Finger Curls to extension
- For this exercise, bend your fingers tightly towards the hand attempting to touch the finger’s bottom before touching the hand. After clenching them tightly, extend your fingers away from the hand. Like the other exercises, clench your fingers and constrict your muscles, and for the extension, use the muscles to enhance the fingers’ extension movement.
- Table Top to extension
- For this exercise, bend your fingers to a straight table position and then extend your fingers. At the table position, hold it for five seconds and clench your fingers tightly together. For extension, use all your muscles in your hands to extend your fingers as far as you can for five seconds.
- Finger palm reach downs
- For this exercise, start with your fingers straight and then try to bend your fingers to the bottom part of your palm and hand. When you reach for the palm, hold it for five seconds and try to utilize every single muscle in your body to go further down. As you are reaching down, tightening the fingers together can make the exercise more challenging. Again, as you extend your fingers, hold them for five seconds and use all your hand muscles to open them more.
