Hands up for hand and wrist strength.
Do you send up a silent prayer before every Pilates class, hoping that there will be no planks on the hands and knees?
We often hear that spending too much time on hands and knees, or in plank positions, leads to pain and discomfort in our students’ wrists. So, they avoid these positions, and then it hurts even more the next time they try to join in!
Is that you too?
Let us give you some tips and tricks to change your mind about these exercises and help your hands feel strong!
1. You need to practice to get stronger.
Avoiding positions because they are uncomfortable is legitimate. But if you don’t build up your strength, it’s going be hard to ever participate in these exercises.
Challenge yourself to join in for the first few repetitions, only seeking an alternative when you feel you can’t physically maintain the position any longer.
You can also practice outside your classes: come onto your hands and knees, and then rock forward slightly, so that you take more weight through your wrists and hands. Hold this position for three full breaths, and then rock backwards to offload your wrists.
Practice this daily, building up the number of breaths you take before relaxing out of the position.
2. Find the arches of your hands.
Our hands, just like our feet, have arches! Arches help to distribute loads, so we can use this inbuilt ability of our hands to help offload the pressure through our wrists and hands.
On your hands and knees, press each of the fingertips into the floor, and notice that the palms of your hands dome upwards. Try to hold this position through the wrist and hand as you go through your exercises.
3. Decompress your wrists.
Often when we’re on our hands, we drop all our weight through our wrists, which compresses the bones in this area and doesn’t feel great!
In addition to finding the arches of the hand, we can spread this space into the wrists and decompress them.
On your hands and knees, press equally through the palm into the mound of the thumb and the mound of the little finger. Use these points of the palm to really press the floor away. Notice the activation and stability around your wrists, and how you can decompress the bones.
4. Use your shoulders.
The more you activate and use the muscles around your shoulder blade and upper arm, the less work your wrists and hands need to do. And these muscles are much bigger than the ones in your hands, so they have the capacity to work harder and support more of the body’s weight.
On your hands and knees, push the floor away, and notice the shoulder blades come apart. Keep your chest lifting away from the floor as you straighten your elbows to activate the muscles across your upper back, shoulder blade, and shoulders. Keep holding this strength to move.
Now put all of those ideas together. What do you feel? You’ll still be taking weight and load through your wrists and hands, but now you’re sharing that load. And we all know that sharing is caring. 😉
Want some more practice? Check out our class schedule and book now!
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