Have you ever thought about how much you use your wrists during the day?
Just about any time you move your arm and hand, your wrist will be actively involved. And in our modern techno world, our wrists can be involved in typing, texting, swiping and scrolling for hours and hours daily.
Based on this fact alone, you’d assume that most people would have mega strong wrists, right?
So why do so many people struggle with wrist pain when they attempt to do any kind of exercise where weight is placed on the joint? This, of course, excludes people who have injuries or bio-mechanical issues with their wrist joint, let’s assume we’re talking about healthy joints.
Most people explain the pain as having “weak wrists”, which isn’t really correct. The problem and pain actually comes from weak core strength.
Let’s use gravity as a way of explaining this.
Gravity is what stops us from floating away in to space. It is essentially “pushing” us down to the ground with an immense force that we don’t notice at all because we are in it all the time.
When your spine is upright, either sitting, standing, walking or running, the force of gravity is going down through your spine and legs.
When you go in to a weight bearing position with your upper body, like push ups, the force of gravity is then going down through your arms and in to your wrists and hands.
If we use the image of a spring to represent core strength, when you have strong core strength, the spring is fully extended and actually pushing up into gravity, essentially stopping it from squashing us and giving our body a feeling of lightness.
If you have weak core strength it’s like the spring is being completely squashed and your body feels heavy and being pushed in to the ground…gravity is winning.
So if your wrists hurt when you put weight on them, it’s most likely that gravity is winning and your body weight is being pushed down in to joint.
When you first start pilates and weight bearing through the wrists, it needs to be done for just short periods of time with lots of assistance and modifications. As your core strength increases, your ability to take your body weight through the wrist will increase, enabling you to move on to more advanced pilates exercises.
This will then increase your core strength, which will then make you lighter on your wrists.
So no need to strengthen your wrists…just get stuck in to your core strength.
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