Welcome to our desk yoga to relieve hand and forearm tension,
To give your body a quick break.
Let's begin by sitting comfortably with your back straight,
Your hands resting on your thighs.
Take a few deep breaths,
Inhaling deep through your nose and exhaling through your mouth.
Close your eyes,
Focus on your breath and give yourself permission to let go of any tension in your body and your mind.
Straighten your arms in front of you,
Make gentle fists with your hands and rotate your wrists in circles,
Both clockwise for about 10 repetitions.
10,
And we're going to switch and go the other way for 10.
10,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10.
This is just going to wake up those wrists and forearms,
Get some blood moving back in there.
Next,
We're going to open our palms and rotate your arms so your palms are facing down.
Open your fingers as wide as you can and use your left hand to gently pull back on the fingers of your right hand.
And you're going to feel that stretch in the palms of your wrists.
And as you hold your fingers here,
We're just going to gently rotate your hand and your fingers back and forth.
If you were turning a knob,
Keep your elbows straight and you're going to feel that stretch along the forearm.
And just move those hands back and forth,
Holding the fingers back with your left hand.
Make sure to get the thumb.
Great.
Let's change sides.
So come up with your right hand,
Pull the left fingers back,
All five of them.
Hold that stretch for a minute.
And now same thing.
Rotate the hand so you can feel that stretch through the forearm.
Perfect.
Next,
We're going to bring our palms together in front of you in a prayer formation so your elbows are at 90 degrees parallel to the floor.
Keep your fingers wide,
Wide,
Wide.
And press your fingers and palms into each other so there's a little bit of tension there.
Keeping your elbows parallel to the floor,
We're going to rotate your fingers so they are pointed towards you.
And then rotate so that your fingers are pointed away from you.
So your hands and your arms stay in this prayer formation in front of your heart.
And you're just rotating the wrists and your hands so you can feel that mobility through the front,
The bottom part of your forearms.
And just keep rotating this back and forth and you're just going to get a little bit more mobility through that area.
Keep the fingers wide,
A little bit of tension on the fingers.
Good.
So now we're just going to switch that so the backs of your hands are going to be touching.
And we're going to do the same thing.
We're going to open the fingers wide,
A little bit of tension on the back of the hands and into the fingers.
Arms still bent at 90 degrees,
Hands still in front of your heart.
And we're going to rotate the wrists and the hands back and forth.
So the fingers are like a pendulum swinging down and out in front of you and back in towards your heart.
And we're going to do this a few times.
Back and forth and back and forth.
You're going to feel that open up in your forearms.
You feel a little bit of the energy moving in there.
Go a little further each time.
One more good one.
And back.
Great.
So now we're going to interlace our fingers.
And we're going to use the right thumb to gently but firmly massage the palm of your left hand.
We're going to just add a little bit of pressure.
And if you follow your fingers down into the palm of your hands,
Into where the carpal bones are,
All of this soft tissue we want to just work a little bit.
These get so cramped up when we're doing typing or writing.
So with your thumb,
Just add a little pressure and massage through that area of your palm.
Get into some of the muscles right into your thumb.
You're going to feel some warmth coming in that area as we get some extra blood flow in there.
Really wake that area up.
And now we're just going to switch our hands.
We're going to use the left thumb to really work some of these soft tissues in the palm of our right hand.
Just follow each of the fingers down through your palm.
Get all the muscles in between the bones.
Feel some of that warmth.
That's great.
So last little stretch here.
We're just going to bring our hands back into prayer position.
In front of our heart,
Fingers wide,
Elbows out.
And just push our palms down towards the floor.
Feel that last stretch through the forearm.
Great job.
There you go.
Now,
Get back to work.
Or maybe not.
Have a great rest of your day.
