Exercises for Hand Heavy Creatives
Lesson 6 from: How to Prevent Aches and Repair the Body of a Career CreativeAaron Alexander
Exercises for Hand Heavy Creatives
Lesson 6 from: How to Prevent Aches and Repair the Body of a Career CreativeAaron Alexander
Lesson Info
6. Exercises for Hand Heavy Creatives
Lessons
Course Introduction
02:17 2Daily Exercises for Every Creative
13:41 3Unwinding the Body with the Couch
10:41 4Realigning for Photographers & Videographers
04:25 5Overcoming Back Pain
22:29 6Exercises for Hand Heavy Creatives
10:16 7Optimizing Your Home Office & Eye Health
13:16 8Travel Hacks
11:52Lesson Info
Exercises for Hand Heavy Creatives
All Right, so this next section is for creators that are utilizing their hands and wrists quite a bit, possibly in positions that could manifest tension and pain. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna start to unwind that tension. So all you need is a floor and a, any kind of ball would be great, lacrosse ball or any kind of ball that you have lying around, really, just as long as it's dense enough, and then a resistance band. So what we're gonna do is we're going to start off and just use our hands and the ground to get going. We're just gonna turn our arms, boop, over like this. And we're gonna drop them down onto the ground. And just slowly exploring a little stretch through the wrists. So the carpal bones and all the connected tissue through the wrists, they are less is more. So it's kind of like working with the cervical spine or working with the organs. You don't need to abuse your wrists, right? What we're doing is trying to unwind abuse in the wrists. So just going back and for...
th, oscillating, a little bit of opening through that space. And then you come up into all fours and just start to alternate driving those wrists and those hands down into the ground. So essentially what we're doing is we're reversing those patterns, if you're holding a pencil, if you're holding a mouse, if you're editing a lot, if you're holding a camera, we're just doing the exact opposite of what we'd be doing in those positions. So the prescription for this is going through this motion just about a minute or so, be a great way to warm up before you're doing your creative endeavor. Be a great way to start to unwind some tension that you may have created. And then you're going to go on the inside direction and we can actually use our knee, if you don't have a ball or a resistance band, or anything of the sort, you could actually just use your knee and drop your, your knee onto the hand and start to play with opening and closing the hand while that knee is pressing weight, opening up space, decompressing, tractioning all those little carpal bones. Then you can drop your knee onto the forearm because your hands are not just your hands, your hands encompass your entire forearm. And if there's tension going up into the elbow, that tension will be directly associated to what's happening in the actual hand itself. So from here, we can come up, we did a little massage, finding any point that just feels like if there's any, like, beef jerky, stickiness, tension, rigidity, maybe subtle, like, heightened sensation when you're pressing down on that, that'd be a great area to, kind of, sink into, breathe, long exhalations, wiggle the fingertips, and kind of just started to create a little hydration in those connected tissue layers. Next thing is we're gonna use a ball like so to work on the opposite side. So the inside are all these flexors, the muscles that make your wrists go (popping) and your your digits go like that. Now the opposite side, the extensors go into this position. So what you're gonna do is you're gonna take a ball, You're going to roll that ball up and down through these extensor muscle bellies. So when you're working with your body, you're doing manual therapy with yourself, self care with yourself, what you really wanna do is you wanna get through in the, in, in between spaces of those muscle bellies. That's where the highest concentration of mechanoreceptors exist. You really want to get those tissue layers to be able to slide on top of each other. The way you do that is take a ball, and you can add a little pressure from the top, and just starting to roll through that, those muscle bellies in the extensor group on the back side of the forearm. From here, you can play with starting to open and close the hand as you're going through that motion. This is gonna be so invaluable for people that are working on a computer a lot. If you're holding a mouse a lot, if you're holding, you know, I guess maybe people don't have mouses as much, but you're just on your, your keyboard a lot. If you're drawing, if you're painting, anything where your wrist's being held in a position, this is gonna be incredibly valuable for you guys. So going all the way up, something to be aware of is moving all the way up to the actual attachment points of these extensors, and also of the flexors, and every other muscle in your body. The attachment points, like the muscular septa that I described before, they have the highest concentration of what are called mechanoreceptors, which are essentially sensory cells that dictate the tonicity of your muscles. So if you are really tense in some area in your body, you drop that slow, deep pressure into that attachment point, just like we're doing here, drop that pressure in, and start to do a little motion through. You could move through the wrist. You could move through the fingers. You could do a little subtle supination, pronation, or rotating the, the arm in and out. I'm feeling there's, like, some, some pretty interesting stuff for me right here right now. Woo. Holy smokes. This is, like, I should be with this for, like, another four or five minutes. So if I'm feeling this right now, I'd imagine most folks at home are probably feeling this as well. And so I can turn my body a little bit. I can kind of really just start to use this tool as a feedback mechanism to get to know my, my body better. So going through, started off opening up the wrists. Then we went through, did some things opening up using our knees to, kind of, create a little space in the hand. Another thing you can do to help open up through the hand using the ball would be, similar thing, just going all the way up, like, rinsing through each digit. So you can go up through the thumb, all the way up to the thumb. You go up to the index finger, go up into the middle, up into the ring, up into the pinky. You can rotate around. And just starting to bring some new blood, new sensory awareness to all of these joints. Your hands are what feeds you. Your hands are what create art. Your hands are what take care of others. Your hands are such an important, invaluable tool to be able to express and communicate with the world. So opening up the space around these digits is such invaluable tool or practice to really live a better life. So next thing we're gonna play with is saying, okay, cool. So we went through, open up some space around the wrist, open up some space around the hands, open up some space around the forearm, flexors, extensors, all the way through. Now we're saying, okay, well the hands and the wrists and all this, they're connected to, what? The, the shoulders. So if the shoulders are chronically tight and tense, then we're gonna have problems downstream into the forearms and vice versa. So what I do is take one of the align bands and we're going to come into a position. Just bring the elbows out in front, like so. And what we're gonna do is play with a little external rotation of the forearm. So you're gonna be here and play with, boop, pressing those bands apart, keeping the elbows stationary in front, and back in. Pressing out, keep the ribs tucked towards your hips. Use your breath. So as you go out, you can breathe in. And then as you come back in, exhale. You're gonna do 12 reps of this. (inhaling and exhaling) Let's get six more. (inhaling and exhaling) You're gonna feel this in the back of the shoulder girdles, you might feel this in the scapula, might feel this really deep in the rotator cuff muscles in the shoulders. And what's this, what this is doing is it's doing literally the, the opposite position of what? Of this. So throughout the day, we're in this curled up position where our, our wrists are flexed. We might be closing in that carpal tunnel, locking down the median nerve and these various different nerves that are passing through this space to innervate our hands. We're creating this medial rotation in the shoulders, and we're really closing down this whole channel where there's an immense amount of, of blood, and lymph, and nerve fibers. It's called the brachial plexus that passes through the neck here. If you bind up that channel, you're really binding down a, a primary circulation point in your entire body. So opening up this space, doing the exact opposite position of this is gonna be invaluable for correcting these patterns, really, for the rest of your life and not just being something you do, you know, for one physical therapy session, but start to implement these practices before you work out, before you perform your art, afterwards, to, kind of, correct some of the patterns that may have transpired. And that is enough for your hands and wrists for now. The other videos that'd be really supportive would be tapping into the videos that we did with correcting forward head posture. All of those would be amazing to tie into this. The couch stretch, spending time on the ground, laying on your back, twisting, turning, just going and taking a walk, allowing your body to circulate with regularity. All that's gonna be absolutely invaluable. And I hope this is supportive for you guys. I know that my wrists feel a lot more open now so hopefully you guys feel the same. Let's move on to the next section.