We’re about to start working on our hands. Seems like a subject that until you have something go wrong with one of your hands, you don’t think of it as being important. I always say in my group classes, someday you’re not going to care about how your jeans fit, you’re just going to want to be able to open a jar.

So we take it for granted, but having really flexible functional fingers is so important. So we’re going to start with some basic things. First of all, you’re going to want to get a blanket or a pad of some sort to have under your hands.

And if you’re not comfortable on your hands and knees, no problem, just stand up facing a countertop or a table that’s low enough that you can straighten your arms. Being able to have your elbows straight is important as the stretch is going to move from the wrist all the way up the arm. So please be gentle.

On some of the techniques, I might suggest that you just go one hand at a time. To make the technique more intense, you lean forward. To make it less intense, you lean back.

We’re going to start with some basic things. Have your hands wider than your shoulders, slightly, and your palms spread and slightly turned out so that your number one, your pointer finger, is an extension of your inner arm and also parallel to the other one. So that it’s a good setup.

From there, lift your palm and bend at the base of your fingers. Now my hands are very flexible, as you can see, so be happy with even lifting up like that. I’ve been working on this for a long time and can bend to about 90 degrees there, but don’t force that right away.

Just like everything else, it’s gradual. So you can lift and lower with your breath. A mild stinging sensation in your hand is perfectly normal as that’s the sensation of your fascia or connective tissue releasing.

After lifting and lowering about 10 times, practice rolling out to the pinky side of your hand and then roll in to the pointer side. If you have time, and this is very intense, you might choose to just do one hand at a time so you can really focus. And then eventually doing both is a little bit more time effective.

Moving on, you’re going to take your fingers this way and bend the wrist back. Now this may be very extreme and your wrist may not go all the way down, so just listen to your body and don’t overdo it. Once you’re there, practice bending your elbows and straightening them nice and slow.

You may feel like they’ll barely straighten at all and barely bend, but whatever they do is great. Remember, a millimeter is a mile on the inside. Take your hands now and bend your knuckles.

As you can see, my finger pads are curled right up against right where we would get calluses on our hand. Each hand or each finger is three bones and those three bones are going to make a square. Press down, as you can see, the square shape.

Press down into those fingernail beds. Sometimes I see in class people are doing this and I say, instead of doing that, do this. This is called tiger paw.

You can see from the side, it looks like a little paw. And just like cats do, you pick it up and put it back down. You feel this lovely intense stretch right through all the different joints in your fingers.

Don’t worry about your thumb yet, as we have some separate techniques for that. Some people do try to tuck it under and get a little stretch in the thumb. Very good.

Now from here, we’re going to bring our palms into a palm open position. Now I’m going to turn to the side just to make it a little bit more clear what I’m doing. So I’m on all fours, palms spread.

You may have seen this before in sculptures of the Buddha. It’s a yoga mudra, which means gesture. So we’re going to go through four yoga mudras.

Touching the thumb and pointer fingerprint together, stretch it back out. Touch the thumb and middle finger, stretch it back out. Now just like anything else in yoga, inhale, exhale, thumb and ring.

Inhale, exhale, thumb and pinky. And then work your way through those mudras several times while your wrist is bent. You can also stretch your hands a lot while sitting around watching TV, even at a red light.

Just basic things like bending the wrist back, pulling the hands this way. One more technique that this might not be good for everybody, so be conservative, make your own decision. One leg at a time is a good start.

You’re going to kneel on your palms. So you place your kneecap right on your palm and then on the other. And you use your knee as a little massage tool to work out the tissue in the middle of your hand.

This area in particular, I call it the drumstick of the thumb. It’s a juicy muscle that is really important. Try to isolate that area, maybe doing one at a time, and really press down.

If this whole thing seems too extreme for you, you can just sit with, you know, your coffee table here and put your thumb down and take your elbow, which is a very pointy tool, and press your elbow right into that thumb and move it all around. And also just bend your thumb back and bend each individual finger back. Hand stretching is really important.

You’ll feel the benefits immediately. And if you’ve ever had arthritis, as you know, you have good days and bad days. And this may not be a miraculous cure, although it may be, but it will definitely help you have more good days than bad.