Wrist pain in yoga? Make sure you're doing this!

Transcript

hi everyone and welcome back to my channel today we're talking about wrist pain in yoga and i'm going to talk you through a few different things that you might be doing wrong in your practice that might be contributing to wrist pain so if you're looking forward to learning about this today then make sure you give the video a like by clicking thumbs up below and if you click the bell then you'll get a notification whenever i post a new video like this one so what is the most common mistake that i see people making when it comes to their wrists in their yoga practice well whenever we're bearing weight on our hands which is typically quite a lot in yoga especially if you have an ashtanga style practice we're on the hands quite a lot then you need to be very particular about the way that you place your hands down and some of you might be familiar with what's colloquially in the yoga industry known as hasta banda hasta means hand and banda is like a lock an energetic lock so you're probably more familiar with mullabanda udianabanda jalandhara banda and but hasta bandit is kind of a jokey name that people give to this position of the hands that's ideal when you are bearing weight so i'm going to show you exactly what that looks like now and the mistake that you might be making if you are experiencing wrist pain so whenever the hand is on the floor in yoga and whenever we're bearing weight you want to make sure that the fingers are spread wide so having the hand having the fingers together like this doesn't give you the maximum spread of um weight distribution across the hand and that can be one contributing factor so if you're just placing your hands down on the mat like this try spreading your fingers and keeping the fingers vibrant and active when you're bearing weight and that already should give you a little bit of relief when it comes to wrist pain second thing is you want to try and imagine that you're actually gripping the mat with your hands so the way i think about it when you're correctly doing this hasta bander as it's known it's almost like the whites the tips of your nails become white because you're exerting a little bit of force a little bit of pressure on the tips of the fingers to grip the mat and again that's a really good sign that you've got a strong connection to the mat and that the distribution of your body weight through your arms and your wrists will be well distributed and supported by the position of the hands and thirdly what you can imagine is pressing the base of each finger and your thumbs down into the mat and what this does it gives you a really good connection to the mat so that you can instead of just allowing your weight to dump down into the hands and the wrists you're actually meeting the body weight meeting your body's weight by pushing back so yes the body weight is traveling down but you're also exerting a force down into the mat which creates this energetic lock this bander so when you have two opposing forces equal and opposite going kind of into physics and newton's laws here but when you have two opposing forces that meet each other that are equal then you have an equilibrium so that means bander that is what banda is it's when the energetic forces around a specific point in the body are equal and it creates this effortlessly effortlessness and lightness to whichever position you're in in which case when we're talking about the wrists it creates this lovely sense of stability and strength in the wrists let's have a look at those points in a little bit more detail so my first point was if you are placing your hands down on the mat like this and bearing weight on your hands like this then that's almost a guarantee for wrist pain because this is not a very strong connection there's no activity in the hands um and the weight is just being directly sent down through the wrist joint so instead spread your fingers wide and here the position of your the the rotation of your hands is a little bit fluid and will depend on um the shape of your shoulder joint so most people find that it's it feels okay to point your first finger upwards so that the crease of your wrist is parallel to the top of your mat for those of us with slightly stiffer shoulders sometimes opening the hands up like this so further turning the hands out can help but generally speaking look for your wrist crease to be parallel to the top of your mat and spread your fingers wide so that's step one step two is then to start to grip the mat with your fingertips so what that looks like instead of just having the fingers relaxed actually push down through the fingertips so can you see there that the tips of my fingers under my nails go slightly white because i'm exerting a force that's the kind of effect you're looking for i'm exaggerating a little bit here but you get the idea you want to have that connection as if you're gripping the mat so my then my final point was to think about pushing the floor away with your hands always always when you're bearing weight on your hands it's not just sinking down you're meeting that force of gravity by pushing the floor away so what that creates is this energetic lift this bander in the hands that helps to support the weight of the body without putting too much pressure on the wrists so these tips were fairly fundamental in terms of how to safely work bear weight on your hands when you're practicing yoga but let's say that you think you're doing all of those actions correctly but as you're learning some of the newer more advanced postures arm balancing postures like buju pidasana or um bakasana um and maybe i'll just put a diagram of bujupidasana here for those of you who aren't familiar with the pose let's say you're starting to learn this posture and you're getting a little bit of wrist discomfort one thing that you could look at doing if you're already practicing all of those techniques with hasta banda one thing you could try and do is not to go so far into wrist extension so it's probably if you're experiencing a lot of discomfort it's probably just that you're going too far with your level of mobility level of flexibility and your muscles just aren't ready to to bear weight and to activate at that range of motion maybe just film yourself doing the posture doing bhujapidasana or any other arm balance where you're finding it uncomfortable and then i want you to bring your wrist out in front of you and have a look at your active level of wrist extension so here we're not bearing weight um at all we're not pulling the hand and the fingers back so this is really my active wrist extension level that means it's the it's the degree of extension i can create myself with my muscles without any external force so if i were to push my hand back i could create more extension but my muscles can't pull themselves into that position and often when we start to bear weight on the hands sometimes we push our wrists past our active range of motion and that can be what causes the discomfort because the muscles are not able to respond actively to support the joint in that new range of motion so it's not the end of the world it just means that you have to dial it back a little bit and very gradually increase your active range so some of the best things you could do would be to increase your range like this so actively pull your wrist into extension and just do a few rounds and you can hold for a few seconds and do this before your practice or at least before you practice those arm balances or any postures that are giving you trouble and just practice going into extension of the wrists without using any external force and that's going to really fire up the muscles in the wrists and to support that new position there are also some really great um functional exercises that you can do for your joint health of your wrists so if you um not familiar with a c-a-r cars and these are controlled articular rotations and it's a way of increasing your joint rotational movement ability and using only muscles so again you're not kind of twisting with an external force you're actively controlling the range of motion in a joint so if you're not familiar with them just have a look on youtube or on google and try some cars for the wrist cars and that again will help to increase your functional mobility and strength in the wrists i hope these tips are going to be useful for you in your practice if you enjoyed the video then please give it a big thumbs up click like below and if you haven't already if you