ABSTRACT The focus of this article is on freeing and strengthening the human hand. Specifically, Michael Boblett presents some practical ideas you may pass on to clients. There is a list of stretches designed to make the hand more flexible by freeing the various proximal phalanges and their respective metacarpals from being stuck to one another and to their neighbors. There is also some advice about various kinds of equipment for hanging, which can be used to apply distal distraction to impingements, especially in the wrist. The article ends with the usual reminder that there are unanswered questions.
I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.
Martin Luther
When Anne Hoff, one of the Co-Editors- in-Chief of this Journal, first asked me to write about hands and arms, my response was more dutiful than enthusiastic: “How can hands possibly be as exciting as feet? Oh, well, I’ll just roll my eyes, and get on with it . . .” Little did I know the journey I was about to take. Indeed, a small part of me is nostalgic for that simpler, easier world I inhabited before I studied hands – my own and those of others – the way I have studied feet for so many years.
Exploring the three-dimensional hand has required more hard work than I ever imagined. I have had to enter, and help my clients enter, a deeply challenging three-dimensional world, if only for an hour or so a week. Entering this world requires digging up and dusting off lost patterns even older and arguably more powerful than any of the ‘roads not taken’ in tail-less bipedalism. (Although I confess that I don’t really know the benefits of a tail in a biped. After all, what do we really know about arthritis in elderly kangaroos? Or superannuated velociraptors, for that matter?)
Figure 1: Passive hanging
In phylogenetic terms, examining the human hand has returned me to the old (but still widely taught) fallacy that our ancestors ‘came down from the trees’ when Africa got drier around the end of the Miocene. Recent research has weakened this idea even more, with major East African ecological changes occurring at a frustratingly mysterious time in the evolution of the genus Homo. But here’s good news for those of you already bracing yourselves for a classic Michael Boblett anthropological journey: I put all that in my next article, “The Three-Dimensional Hand, Part II: Opening the Toolbox” (see page 41). If that’s your cup of tea, enjoy! The message of Part II is that the human hand, like the human foot, can do much more than most humans realize. Why? Well, that’s in the other article. This one has the practical stuff.
Reawakening three-dimensionality in the hand leads to unexpected freedoms throughout the body. Exercises that restore function to the hand inevitably restore lost function to other parts of us. Of course, this insight is not new. Many people in many disciplines have beaten us to the punch here. We live in a world of body-weight exercises involving straps or pulleys, with hanging yoga taking things off into yet another direction. I hope someday to make a list of all such practices – with critical commentary.
But what all these exercises have in common is the new three-dimensionality of a previously two-dimensional environment of floors, pavements, or even the occasional set of stairs or patch of rough ground. My contribution here will hardly be earthshaking, but it is an extension of that world. I begin with some advice on passive hanging, which I consider a prerequisite to a great deal of other work. I then review several pieces of equipment used in hanging. I end with hand exercises that do not require special equipment.
Presently, most exercises that involve hanging by the hands turn quickly into exercises that strengthen other parts of the body. Practitioners do pull-ups, leg extensions, or other movements that require a firm grip only as a prerequisite. But while I also use hand-strength as a necessary introduction to other kinds of work, I also encourage focus on hand- strengthening by itself. I try to get my clients to do passive hanging, which consists of hanging by the hands as long as possible, with the rest of the body as relaxed as possible (see Figure 1).
Why focus on the hand? A better question is, what is the lost potential of the human hand? Like our feet, our hands are very different from those of our remote ancestors and those of the very few people living today who use their hands as they are meant to be used. But unlike the modern foot, the modern hand shows little outward sign of its degeneration. When a foot is misused, it is usually crushed into a narrow shape immediately recognizable as a distortion. Even a broad but flaccid foot is recognizable at its outer edges, very different from those associated with a low but responsive arch. But the hand retains most of its ancient shape, only sometimes showing a tell-tale thickening of the thenar eminence in contrast to the underdevelopment of the other structures. This is often accompanied by a thickening of the joints leading to and involved in the thumb. But the real distortion, deeper than any imbalance in use and development, is an overall weakness in the whole hand. The wonderful fact is that the modern hand, in the vast majority of people, has a remarkable capacity to draw on strength that can be developed even late in life. I am sixty-seven and I am still experiencing rapid monthly increases in hand-strength, following a routine taught to me by a twenty-five-year-old personal trainer at one of the gyms I attend.
What follows is unprecedented for me in this Journal: it involves strengthening versus stretching. Indeed, I hesitated to include this kind of work in this article at all, given that it does not fall into what is generally understood to be the scope of Rolfing® Structural Integration (SI) practice. But I teach this routine, as well as the ideas underlying it, because my clients need increased hand strength to accomplish a long list of stretches that can help them greatly. I find that many issues in the shoulder girdle, spine, and hips begin to resolve when the human body revisits the older functions of hanging and even swinging. This is because traction (which is distraction) is the essence of hanging.
The problem is that most modern people can only hang for short periods. As a result, many of my clients believe that long-term hanging is impossible for them. But the underlying difficulty is rarely one of inherent strength. Almost always, the problem is comprehension. Our society is unused to exercises that involve endurance versus explosiveness. Our society is also unused to exercises that involve relaxing most muscles while engaging a few, though proper weight- lifting actually requires this.
Paradoxically, most of the solutions to hand-strengthening lie in precisely that often-misunderstood world of weightlifting. I am not often a fan of weights, but I used to lift weights frequently. I learned a lot from the overall process involved. Specifically, I learned the value of step-by-step work to increase the function of specific structures.
With weights, I would strengthen a particular muscle by 1) measuring what I did in each session, 2) writing it down, and 3) trying to beat my previous record the next time. The same methods work in passive hanging. I simply apply the organizational tools of weightlifting in another area. What follows may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how few people ‘get’ this without help. Here’s what I tell my clients:
Now for specifics of time. What follows is the routine taught to me by that twenty- five-year-old trainer I mentioned. The trick is increasing hanging time while decreasing rest time. The young man presented me with this ideal routine:
Have I done this? No! I can hang for 90, 75, 60, 45, and 30 seconds. But I require two minutes (120 seconds) of rest in between. So how do I improve? Slowly, I am decreasing my rest time. I am also working toward adding hanging times of 105 and 120 seconds, in this case retaining my 120 seconds of rest.
If all these numbers are bewildering to you, join the club. Most of my clients feel the same way – at first. The key is the awareness that Rome wasn’t built in a day! And, as some of us say in Southern California: “Rome wasn’t built in a day. If it
For hanging, there is equipment I recommend and equipment I do not recommend. What follows is just what I have used myself. There is more stuff out there. But I will neither recommend nor reject what I have not tried.
My first piece of equipment is pull-up bars and there are two kinds of pull-up bars that I recommend to clients. One is cheaper and much easier to assemble, the other costs more and requires tools to put it together. The costlier version has a biomechanical advantage that will be discussed. I present both types, each with an example available on Amazon.
First, there is the standard pull-up bar that hangs over the doorway (Figure 2A), but has handles that stick out below the level of the door jamb. The advantage is cheapness and easy assembly. The disadvantage is obvious: I must pull my feet up if they’re not to touch the floor. I stand 5’5” on a good day, but this complicates even my hanging routine. But the model I show here is available for
$19 on Amazon. Not bad for something that can change your life!!
The second type (Figure 2B) has handles that go back up in a U-shape when seen from the side. These bars are bigger, costlier, and a bear to assemble. I could not assemble mine without tools, which fortunately I have. The model I show here sells on Amazon for $59. For tall clients, this model will not solve the problem of having to lift feet from the floor, but it’s an improvement. I’m considering assembling and selling these out of my office.
Other equipment options for hanging consist of things that attach permanently to walls and ceilings, with all the associated costs and complications. As I suggested above, I haven’t explored these things, so I won’t write about them (but one example is shown in my interview with Kevin Frank on page 61).
The final option is going to the gym, where there are usually several choices for hanging. But I suggest hanging at the gym only as a stop-gap measure, because the exercises I suggest require precise timing, which the gym makes difficult if not impossible. Precise timing requires either a clear view of a clock or the ability to keep track of the passing seconds on a cellphone or other device set out nearby in plain view. This is rarely possible.
I conclude with the one piece of equipment I do not recommend: inversion tables. I used to own one of these and I dislike them. These are my reasons:
I can’t say this often enough: we are designed to do many, many things occasionally, not one or two things all the time. So now that I have discussed strengthening grip and hanging, I turn to stretches that do not require equipment. I must begin with the sad caveat that only one of these exercises (the last one) is appropriate for most people. Life is frustrating!
Inefficient hand-use leads to what I will call ‘the tyranny of the thumb’, just as inefficient use of the foot leads to what I have previously called ‘the tyranny of the big toe’. As I address foot-problems by encouraging independent movement of various toes, so I encourage independence between fingers. As with feet, I like to separate digits by juxtaposing extension of one digit with flexion of its neighbor(s). But in the case of fingers, there are more opportunities for such juxtapositions.
Spreading the toe-box has a counterpart in spreading the ‘finger-box’. In the former, we separate metatarsals; in the latter, metacarpals. In both cases, separation involves not only widening of the overall structure, but functional separation between rotating and counterrotating long bones coming out of the ankle and wrist respectively. In both cases, rotational independence can be elicited partly by inducing independent movement in flexion and/or extension. But here the similarity breaks down. Granted, feet and hands both suffer from a similar problem: the dominance of the largest digit. But what I call the ‘tyranny of the big toe’ works very differently from the ‘tyranny of the thumb’. And, these two tyrannies must be resisted using different strategies.
In a previous article I have shown how the big toe may be separated from the other toes in both flexion and extension (Boblett 2018, 19). Separation between toes 2-5 is much harder to achieve. Frankly, it isn’t a skill I’ve studied, except to realize how difficult it is. Here we may be approaching the limits of evoking a truly articulate foot, though I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
I have never, for example, tried to play a musical instrument with my toes.
With the hand, the equation is very different. Each of the five fingers can be stretched in relation to one or both of its neighbors – depending on how many neighbors it has. This reflects the greater length of fingers versus toes, but also the greater functional independence of different fingers.
This is a fact I admit with reluctance, having stressed for years the hand-like nature of a healthy human foot. But with increased opportunities for independent movement come increased chances of injury. Please be careful with these exercises: they are not for everyone. Contraindications include osteoporosis, osteopenia, and any client with a tendency to jerk or ‘power through’ stretches. Fingers sprain easily! A background in yoga can be helpful, as long as it’s relatively ‘real’ yoga and not some macho American version designed for impatient people.
Please note that my photographs for these stretches are much less symmetrical than I’d hoped. The reason has to do with the fact that I had exactly ten seconds to get my hands into place before my camera took the shots. But this is serendipitous, because it demonstrates clearly that symmetry will not happen quickly in these stretches. Indeed, it may not happen at all. In fact, I encourage my clients to work toward narrowing the space between the relevant joints when the hands are pressed together (this will be clearer as you read the instructions below) rather than try for a premature symmetry. If one hand, or one part of one hand, releases more quickly than another, go with it. We Rolfers make too much of a fetish of symmetry, anyway!
With that reassuring intro, here goes:
Create a diamond-shaped pattern with index and middle fingers, index finger extended and middle finger flexed, as shown in Figure 3 (A). Press hands together gently to reduce space between the ends of the second metacarpals (B). Gradual movement is important and achieving the maximum stretch may not be possible, even over time – emphasize this when teaching this to clients. Hold for ten seconds. Shake out hands.
Create a diamond pattern with middle fingers extended and index and ring fingers flexed (see Figure 4, A). Press hands together to minimize the space between the distal ends of the third metacarpals (B), with the same warnings as apply for the previous stretch. Note that the minimal space will probably be greater than for the previous exercise. Hold for ten seconds. Shake out hands.
Stretching Finger 4 versus Fingers 3 and 5
Create a diamond pattern with the ring fingers extended and both middle and little fingers flexed (see Figure 5, A). Press hands together (B), with the same caveats as before. Here, the minimal space will probably be dramatically greater, even more than for the previous two exercises. Hold for ten seconds. Shake out hands.
Creates a diamond shape with the little finger extended and ring fingers flexed (see Figure 6, A). Press hands together (See Figure 6, B), same warnings. The minimal space will probably be more like the space for the first exercise; smaller than for the second and third exercises. Hold for ten seconds. Shake out hands.
The thumb is far more complicated to stretch. Creating interdigital independence with a simple diamond pattern doesn’t work here, given the structure of the hand. But thumb release is essential. I’m eager to solve this problem. So far, this is the best I can do.
The opposable thumb is rarely the independent thumb. Nor are other fingers independent of the thumb. But the problem is the opposite of the problem with the big toe and its neighbors, which line up too much. To bypass this biomechanical difficulty, I go ‘upstream’ to the wrist, where the base of the thumb is so often jammed into what sits proximally
to the first metacarpal, creating a lack of independent motion between the trapezium and the trapezoid (see Figure 7, A) Sometimes, these two bones will join to form a three-bone lump reaching even more proximally to involve the scaphoid. This lump will then grind against the capitate and lunate bones, creating an even bigger area of dysfunction (Figure 7,
To start the stretch, face a wall with your arm held out at a right angle to your body. (Figure 8, A). (If right-handed, it is best to begin with the left hand, where you may assume there are fewer restrictions. If left-handed, the opposite may usually be assumed. Obviously, these assumptions will not always be true, so use your best judgement.) Without bending the elbow, press your palm into the wall at shoulder height or a little above. The closeup image labeled B shows how the fingers and hand point superiorly. Now use your other hand to spread your fingers to their maximum distance from each other (C) then lean into the wall, pressing the wrist into extension. If there is sharp pain, cease this exercise and pursue other methods of stretching/decompression before re-attempting it.
If and when you can put the wrist into full right-angle extension, rotation of the elbow becomes a possibility. In the beginning, the elbow crease will usually face medially to the body (Figure 9, A). The exercise consists of rotating the elbow so that the crease moves as far laterally as possible (B). The client can then hold in this position. Restrictions may be felt all the way up the line from the base of the thumb to the scapulae or even the occiput. This exercise can be used again and again, working on many different restrictions. Indeed, I often use it as a diagnostic tool to determine the locations of problems.
An even more advanced version of this stretch involves bringing the angle of the arm downward, increasing the extension of the wrist past 90˚ (Figure 10, A). I have had less success with bringing the angle of the arm upward to decrease wrist
extension (See figure 10, B) for clients who cannot achieve the 90˚ angle. My difficulty in teaching this last stretch may be due to factors I have not yet identified. One problem may be the difficulty of communicating this possibility to already- frustrated clients!
This exercise to stretch/decompress the thumb/wrist also shows potential for relieving carpal tunnel syndrome, or helping in other situations where the radius and ulna fail to rotate properly. In most such cases, this exercise combined with work on the epicondyles can restore a great deal of rotational movement.
Compared to my other articles for this Journal, this submission leaves a particularly long list of threads hanging. To recap, these include a review of other modalities that involve hanging by one’s hands and assessmwent of other kinds of hanging equipment. More important, the present article ignores the evolutionary background of the human hand. Normally, I would have subjected my readers to lengthy background material and exercises in the same article. This time, I chose to separate these elements into separate articles, a pattern I hope to follow in future.
That being said, I do have further advice about movement in my article on the evolution of the hand (see page 41). I do not present exercises. Rather, I have ideas about how we Rolfers can preserve our own hands. This advice fits better in the anthropological article. If and when you choose to read it, my reasons will be clear.
Michael Boblett has been a Certified Rolfer since 2003 and a Certified Advanced Rolfer since 2008. His graduate degrees (MA, MDiv, and DMin) are from Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. At seminary, his focus was on the anthropology of religion with experiential training under Michael Harner, author of The Way of the Shaman. He does competitive trail running and leads hikes in the San Bernardino Mountains for unwary lowlanders, wearing Vibram FiveFingers® for both sports.
Boblett, M. 2020 Mar. “The Three- Dimensional Hand, Part 2: Opening the Toolbox.” Structure. Function. Integration: The Journal of the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute® 48(1):44–47.
Boblett, M. 2018 Mar. “The Three- Dimensional Foot, Part 3: Opening the Generous Sole.” Structural Integration: The Journal of the Rolf Institute® 46(1):19–22.
The Three-Dimensional Hand, Part 1: Get a Grip!
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