♪ Bob and Brad ♪
♪ The two most famous physical therapists on the internet ♪
- Howdy folks, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- We are the most famous physical therapists
on the internet.
- And in our opinion, of course.
- Our humble opinion.
Today we're gonna talk about the best wrist forearm
stretches to release tightness and pain.
We're going all the way from the beginner
to the advanced, Brad.
- Right.
- This is quite often the case
that you're gonna need after you've had injury, surgery,
I'm taking the reigns of this video, by the way.
- Right.
- If you've been casted, or if you have arthritis,
you're gonna wanna do the first two.
We'll tell you ones you shouldn't do.
- Right, we'll walk you right through it.
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Because this is gonna fit right in with this.
- Okay!
Because we're giving,
We're always doing a give away, every week
And this week we're giving away the
Thermotex infrared system.
- The heating system.
- And this thing works great on wrists and hands.
It actually penetrates all the way through the wrist,
the heat does.
- And it's a gentle heat, works well,
so if you need some heat, yeah, it's a good system.
- You can sign up for our contest, you go to bobandbrad.com
it's under giveaways or you can go to our Facebook,
BobandBrad, it's pinned to the top of the page.
- So we've had a lot of people comment
that we do have a couple other videos that talk about
wrist range of motion and stretching.
This comes at it from a little different angle.
We always learn things new all the time,
and come up with different treatments.
- Ways to go at it.
- Yep, so that's what we're gonna do.
So, we're gonna start out with just the wrist
flexion and extension.
- Yeah, there's generally five main positions
that we're looking at here.
Flexion and extension, should I go this way?
- Sure, so we're gonna break it down.
So first of all, just see if you can move your wrist
all the way, and compare it to your other wrist,
assuming your other wrist is healthy,
you can kinda see if this wrist rolls.
- Wouldn't that be easier on the table Brad, or not?
- Well, we could use a table, good idea Bob.
- I just think it's easier to compare.
- There you go,
so if this one's only coming up about that far,
and the other one comes way up, well you know,
you want to get to that point.
- You know what your goal is.
- If you're old, or you had a problem,
maybe that was normal,
so we're gonna work flexion and extension first.
And then, turn your thumb up like this,
and then this is called radial and ulnar deviation.
- Right.
- Just a different range of motion.
And the next one is supination and pronation,
and that works the forearm,
way up into the elbow there's joints and muscles
working up there quite a bit more.
And it does work nice Bob,
to stabilize it on a table like this.
- Right, and these often are tight
in all directions after a surgery.
- Exactly.
- And some of them tend to be worse than others.
We don't know which one it's gonna be in your case,
but you'll want to look at every one of them.
- Once you get your flexion feels good,
your rotation feels good, and this feels good,
- Ulnar, radial deviation.
- Then it's time to go to the next step.
That is passive range of motion, put a little stretch on it
to make sure it's as far as it's gonna go.
Because you want all the range that you can get.
If you're gonna extend, you could go like this,
but we don't want you to grab the finger tips,
grab at the base of the fingertips
because there's tendons associated with the fingers
that you don't want to influence the wrist extension.
Isolate the wrist, here, and you can go like this
and hold it two or three seconds,
and you can do that 10 times,
or you can do a sustained stretch,
hold it 15-30 seconds and then relax it.
Do that two or three times.
And then when you go down, same thing,
you don't want to roll the fingers all the way up and under.
We want to focus on the wrist, so at the knuckles,
there, the big knuckles, we're going to stretch there.
Again, stretch and hold and relax, 10 times.
- Again, you could do this on a table,
if you want, off the table.
- Yeah, you bet, so we can do it that way.
And the same thing going this way.
When you do this way, you don't have to worry
about the fingers, whether they're flexed or extended.
This is usually not the biggest problem.
- Usually not a problem, usually you don't loose,
But would you stretch it into pronation and supination?
- Sure, we can go the palm up,
and give it a little rotation stretch.
- Yeah, give it a little extra stretch.
- I just like, when I have my patients, I grab your palm,
here, the thumb in the middle of the palm,
and then over this way, grasp here.
And all these stretches,
you don't want to make them so painful that it creates
sharp pain, just a nice gentle stretch pain.
- Yeah, you're only going bumping into the pain
as we always say, you're not going deep into it.
So it's been pretty simple, right now we've done
the same motion and then we added a stretch to that,
all of those motions.
- And this may take a week, or two weeks.
I've had people after a cast, take two or three weeks
before they regain, sometimes more.
- And then you want to get to that point
where it's equal to the other side, if possible.
- Right, again, assessing, comparing one to the other.
If you need a little more range of motion,
usually this is with younger people,
who want to get back
to more aggressive sports and activities,
and a good way to do it is, we're pulling this way,
but you can put your hand here
and we're gonna work on extension,
but don't do it like this, this is the wrong way to do it.
The way you want to do it is get your fingers over the edge,
so your fingers are flexed.
- So we're focused just on the wrist itself.
- Right, and then lean forward.
- Just gently lean forward,
so basically we're extending the wrist like this.
- Bob you can see, I don't know if you can see,
but Bob's wrists extend further than mine do
and that's just the way mine, that's genetic,
that's the way we are.
- Sure.
- And again, same frequency, same time duration,
either 10 reps of pressure on, pressure off.
Or two or three of 15-30 seconds.
And you can do the same, going this direction.
Usually this direction, I find with my patients,
comes a little easier than this direction.
- Right, I found the same.
This is the one that tends to be restricted.
- Now for those people who are high level,
they want to get back to a sport,
maybe baseball, hockey, golf, where you really need
some good range of motion, you're younger
- And strength.
- And strength, a lot of dynamic range of motion
we're going to get into next.
This is what I like to do.
I just started this in the last year.
Take a stick, we use the Booya Stik,
because it works really well.
You need something at least three feet,
this is five feet long.
I wouldn't go any long than five feet.
You could use a piece of doweling.
If you want the Booya Stik, we have that in our,
below on our favorite products over on Bobandbrad.com
Look at the point of the stick,
and that's going to be the starting point,
right in front of your chest.
You want to get your stance, if it's in your right hand,
your right foot is forward and you're going to make
a figure eight with that point of the stick.
So imagine there's a piece of chalk there,
and you have a chalkboard that wraps around your body.
- A sideways figure of eight, is that what you're saying?
- Well, yeah, just watch this.
We're going here, and make that loop, and then
we're going to come back to the cross where it started,
now we're going to make the other part of the figure 8
over on the right side.
- Isn't that the symbol for infinity?
- Yeah, could be!
There you go, it'd be a sideways figure eight or infinity.
I don't wanna hit ya Bob.
And you just work this,
now this works not only the wrist, and the elbow,
it also works the shoulder so you're really preparing
your whole right arm and shoulder
for upper level activities.
- I don't know that I would do this one
if you have arthritis, this might flair things up.
- That's a good point.
- The first two were appropriate for arthritis,
but this one I would, this is again,
this is more advanced for the athlete, the person that's
getting back into some heavy duty stuff.
- Exactly.
So as you get better with it, and it feels better,
you can try it with your good arm,
if you're right handed or you're left handed,
just the coordination thing will change a little bit.
But at least you'll get a feel for one arm to the other,
the uninvolved versus the injured one.
And once you get to a higher level, you gotta watch,
you can make the circle a little bit bigger,
and a little bit faster.
- Look at this guy! - And you can see how
this is something that for those athletes
who are really working something.
- I'm going to step over here.
- Yeah, you're safe Bob, don't worry about it.
- They always say that.
- But it's a good work out,
you get not only range of motion, coordination,
but you get a fatigued arm.
It's a wonderful technique.
Now start out slow Bob, slow, slow!
The figure eight infinity!
- Right before a person's dog always bites me,
the person always tells me,
"Don't worry, the dog won't bite you."
- Stagger your feet Bob, right foot forward,
right foot, right, right, right!
- Other right foot?
- There ya go, that's it, breathe Bob, relax.
- I'm not as good as you, am I?
- Well, it takes a little practice Bob.
You'd be fine with it, give yourself a couple hours worth
- All right.
once a day for two weeks, you'd be spinnin that baby great.
- Thanks for watching,
remember we can fix just about anything
- Except for...
- A broken heart!
- Do you think this can help?
- No, no. - The Booya stik?
I think it may, someday.
- There's no way it's gonna help Brad.
- We just need to change the color of it.
- All right, thanks for watching.