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MSK Health
Brighton & Hove and West Sussex
Brighton & Hove and West Sussex
Hand and Wrist problems are very common. Pain, tingling, or numbness can affect your ability to do day to day tasks. Sometimes your symptoms can be caused by an injury, while other times symptoms start on their own.
Generally our hands and wrists are very good at their jobs of pushing, pulling, lifting, and gripping. In most cases, your wrist and hand will get better by itself over time, but there are some steps you could take to help.
There are actions you can take to help yourself while your hand or wrist is hurting. You could make a few adjustments to what you do, but try to continue to use it as normally as possible. Some examples of changing how you use your hand/wrist would be to:
How to Protect Your Joints Leaflet
It is safe to exercise even if your wrist/hand is hurting or uncomfortable. This can help to promote normal activity of the wrist/hand again.
Exercise does not mean you have to go to the gym, but is anything to help regain movement and strength in the joints.
There are some examples of exercises to do below. You can use our symptom tracker to check if what you are doing is helping you to improve. If you feel your symptoms are worsening, please stop these exercises and await formative review with a healthcare professional.
Hand & Wrist Get Moving Exercises
Hand & Wrist Get Strong Exercises
Pins and needles, or tingling and numbness are not uncommon in the hand, and can be caused by an irritated nerve. You should continue to move the wrist and fingers as normal, and exercising it will not cause any damage. If this persists, you may benefit by having an assessment with your GP or Clinician.
X-rays and scans can help for a small number of people and in certain situations. However, most of the time it shows us things that are normal for the age of your hand/wrist and are not related to your pain. These sorts of findings will not help the hand/wrist get better. This is why your GP or clinician may say that it is not needed.
Most hand and wrist pain will settle naturally in time with little or no help. Occasionally you may need some extra help to get your hand/wrist better.
If you feel you would like to talk to a healthcare professional to help you further with your hand/wrist you can fill in a self referral form.
Exercise is often used to help you improve your symptoms by increasing your muscular strength. We all need to improve our muscle mass (the amount of muscle we have) before being able to increase our strength, power and endurance.
Strengthening is a process that requires us to challenge our bodies with activity to be able to drive a change. These changes are not immediate and strengthening will take at least 6-8 weeks before we notice big changes.
Below are some ideas of how to choose what repetitions you should be using. Remember that you need muscle mass and strength before you can improve your power and/or endurance:
This is the process where we build muscle mass.
Rep range tends to be greater.
3 sets x 12-15 repetitions.
Improve your strength with lifting heavier loads.
Improve your strength by lifting more repetitions.
3 sets x 3-5 repetitions with a heavier load.
3 sets x 8-12 repetitions slowly.
Hard work (80%)
When you are ‘strong’ you can increase the speed at which you move a load.
4 sets x 4-6 repetitions.
50% maximal effort.
Explosive.
The goal is to be able to improve the amount of time that you can keep going for.
3-4 sets x 15-25 repetitions.
Light resistance.
Do you find it too difficult?
Is your pain worsening
Do you lose good technique/movement patterning?
If Yes, Regress.
Reduce the load.
Reduce the repetitions.
Reduce the depth of the movement
Have you just recently progressed?
Do you feel that there is still a challenge but your pain does not worsen?
If Yes, Maintain.
You might need a bit longer doing what you’re doing.
Do you find it easy?
Can you complete your whole program without a challenge?
Do you not have any flare ups?
If Yes, Progress.
Increase the weight.
Increase the repetitions.