Carpal Tunnel Syndrome - Self Tests and Exercises

so if you're struggling with an egg or a pain in your hand your fingers or even your forearm or perhaps you experience a tingling sensation in your hand fingers or your forearm or you have some numbness in the area or what about maybe you've lost some grip some strength especially with your thumb well if you have these symptoms you might be struggling with a carpal tunnel syndrome now what i'm going to do in this video is i'm going to demonstrate two tests to you you can do at home to determine if the sympathy feeling in your hand and your forearm are actually caused by carpal tunnel syndrome then i'm going to give you some tips on how to reduce the pain immediately and lastly i'm going to give you exercises which will help you with the carpal tunnel syndrome now and help to prevent it in the future okay let's get started [Applause] [Music] so carpal tunnel syndrome is really common when you're pregnant and when you're holding on to your fluids and those fluids can increase the pressure on some nerves in your wrist and give you the symptoms in your hand when you're diabetic or when you have arthritis it's also quite common when you are doing a job which means you have to flex your wrists an awful lot movement awful lot or we have to do a lot of gripping for example when you're operating a vibrating tool or where you're playing an instrument and lastly if you had an injury to your wrist or you've broken your wrist in the past that will also make you more susceptible to carpal tunnel syndrome so the two tests we're going to do are the failure in this test and reverse failure in this test and what we're going to try and do with these tests we're going to put your hands in a certain position and thereby compressing the nerve in the carpal tunnel and that should reproduce your pain so we're looking for a reproduction of those symptoms so the pain the tingling the numbness in your hand and maybe the loss of strength grip strength it could be in your hand could be in your in your forearm as well so the first test we need to do is call the failings test what you need to do is place the back of your hands together yeah push as much as you can keep your shoulder nice down and relax don't shrug your shoulders push your elbows as far down as you can to get maximum flexion in your wrist and need to hold this now for 30 to 60 seconds now after 20 to 30 seconds you should start feeling some symptoms in your hand if you have carpal tunnel syndrome and that means this test is positive so a positive test means it reproduces your symptom so this is the failure in this test hold this for 30 to 60 seconds and after 20 seconds 20 to 30 seconds you should feel your symptoms now a better test is called the reverse valence test and what you do for this test is you place your hand palms together and then you lift your elbows up and you as far as you can but always make sure the palms of your hand keep in contact so keep them up and we're doing the same thing now we're trying to stretch the nerve compress the nerve in the carpal tunnel so you hold this now for again for about 30 to 60 seconds but with this test you should feel those symptoms that you're struggling with after about 10 to 20 seconds so it's a bit more of a clinical relevant test for us a superior test to patient valence test so you hold this again for 30 to 60 seconds make sure your shoulders are nice and down and you push your elbows up push your wrist down as far as you can don't let your hands come away from each other really make sure you you push them together and you hold this now and again if this reproduces your symptoms so your your pain your numbness your tingling or the lack of strength you're having in your in your grip then that's a positive test and it means that you're struggling from a carpal tunnel syndrome and now next i'm going to demonstrate uh some pain relief for you and some exercises which will help with the carpal tunnel syndrome so there are three things we can do for pain reduction the first thing we can do is wear a splint or put some tape on your wrist like i've done here so wearing a splint especially at night or some tape what you do is you reduce the mobility of the wrist and by reducing build your wrist you're creating some rest and as you know we only dressed to heal so i've put some tape on see what is just this tape is a reduced mobility of my wrist to about 50 percent so that the wrist actually gets a bit of a rust and can start to heal you can buy these splints online they're about 10 pounds i recommend you get a splint that only goes around the wrist and the thumb don't get those big ones to go all the way in your forearm i mean they're unnecessary to be quite honest you just want to reduce the limit the mobility of the wrist a little bit so get yourself these these simple simple splints um the second thing you can do is you use ice again i've got an an ice pack here have an ice pack wrap it up in a tea towel and just wrap it around your wrist like that and then you hold this for about 10 uh 10 minutes per hour don't do it for two don't do it longer than that it's quite you've got quite a thin skin in your wrist so you don't want to do it for too long in case you get frostbite obviously make sure you uh apply a bit of cloth between the ice pack and your skin how do either have a t-shirt covering it a long-sleeve t-shirt or you uh have a tea towel covering the the ice pack so you're holding this for about 10 minutes and again ice it reduces the swelling it reduces the inflammation and thereby reduces the the pressure on the median nerve and reducing the symptoms in your wrist and lastly what you can do for immediate pain reduction is try to reduce the activities that might cause the pain so i mentioned before that repetitive wrist movement that might give you the the problem for example work or playing an instrument or using vibrating tools um so either you wear the the splint at work using a vibrating tool or you would use doing that kind of work for a short period of time again to give your wrist a bit of a an opportunity and chance to heal so those are the three things you can do for immediate pain reduction let's move on to some exercises for your rest as well so three types of exercises we need to do which will help you with your carpal tunnel syndrome the first exercise we need to do is called neural flossing and what we do is we try to pull the nerve through the carpal tunnel thereby reducing the pressure on the nerve and reducing the symptoms in your hand we also need to stretch the muscles of your forearm and lastly what we need to do is we can strengthen the muscles surrounding the wrist so the first exercise we're going to do is a spinal stretch and what we do is we're going to floss the nerve through the carpal tunnel here so start start off like this place your tipsy fingers together like so yeah and then elbows need to come up so fingers now pointing upwards then what you do is you tilt your you turn your hands around so your fingers are pointing down my fingers are still spread out and all we do now is we go from making putting our fingers together like this and straightening out the fingers make sure we stretch them at the same time and make sure hand palms touch at the bottom so we stretch out the fingers hand palms are stretching and we're keeping our elbows nice and down and we're keeping our shoulders relaxed as well this is called the spider stretch so you do this for about 10 to 15 repetitions and do about three sets so a spider strike should really help just to pull that nerve through the carpal tunnel so it's the first exercise you need to do daily as i said 15 repetitions do about three sets and you could just throughout the day to be quite honest so that's the first neural stretch that we're doing the second neural stretch we're doing is as follows what you need to do is now place your arm on the side 90 degree angle here with my hand palm facing forward then i'm pulling my arm 30 degrees backwards then what i'm doing now is i'm tilting my hand backwards so my the back of my hand is now going towards my forearm then i'm dropping my arm down to about 30 degrees angle with my body i now tilt my left ear to my left shoulder like such and this is a stretch for the nerve that runs from your neck to the tip of your fingers now we're stretching out the nerve and now when what we can do is we can straighten or floss this nerves using different bits of our body we can use our head to come back to the middle again and tilt our left ear to the side that will floss the nerve all you can do is bend and straighten the elbow so band straighten your elbow to floss the nerve all you can do in this position is keep your head and your elbow in the same position and then bend and stretch your wrist and the same thing here you do about 15 repetitions and you repeat this about three times and this will help to move and pull that nerve through the carpal tunnel and therefore reducing the symptoms that you're feeling in your hands so the second thing we need to do is you need to stretch the muscles in your forearm i'll show you two variants for this the easiest one is this one here where you straighten your elbow make sure your fingers point down what you do is the other hand you grab the tip of your fingers and you pull your hand back as far as you can you should feel that in your forearm and again you hold this for about 10 to 15 seconds and repeat three times a very easy one which one something you can do throughout the day to stretch the muscles in your forearm please make sure you don't uh you don't shrug your shoulders too much keep your shoulders nice and relaxed and down so that's one you can do but even a better one would be this one you use the back of a chair or you could use a table and what you need to do is make sure that your fingertips are on the edge so your fingertips should be on the back of the chair keep your elbows straight fingertips and back of the chair elbows straight and then what you do is you walk back a bit and you really push your elbows forward and this is an absolutely brilliant stretch for the muscles in your form it's better than the one i've shown you before a really good stretch i can really feel this on this area there i can really feel the stretch in these muscles so make sure to tip your fingers i go in the back of the chair and then you straighten your elbows you walk back and back really straighten those elbows get into that stretch hold this again for 10 to 15 seconds repeat about three times and you can do this every day or multiple times a day even and a fantastic exercise to straight stretch the muscles in your forearm now we've reached the last step in our three-step plan to help you with your carpal tunnel syndrome and we now need to start strengthening the muscles around the wrists and your forearms so before we do this it's a good idea just loosen up your wrists so interlink your fingers and just loosen up your wrists a little bit like this so it's loose before you actually start doing these exercises only do it for about 30 seconds to a minute or so and the first exercise we're going to do super simple is we're going to roll up a towel so imagine you're trying to get water out of this towel and what you do is you turn this tower as much as you can and if you can't rotate this any further that's where you're going to hold this for about 10 to 15 seconds 30 if you can but try 10 to 15 to start off with and hold this 10 15 repeat this three to five times you're going to feel this in your forearms and feels in your wrists so hold it there so we've rotated this one way yeah so after done one way also make sure that we do the other way as well so now the other way around so there's already two exercises in one with one towel and again as far as you can rotate and twist this and you hold this again for 10 to 15 seconds don't shrug your shoulders too much keep nice and relaxed and rotating twisters for 10 to 15 seconds and would be three to five times these exercises are something you can do every day so all you need for this one is a towel and some other exercises you can do is you can use a terra band i mean they're very very useful indeed so we've got a tara band here the first movement we're going to do is we're going to rotate our our uh forearm from outside to in that's what we need to do so as you can see i've got my elbow nicely tucked in to my side my thumb is facing outwards shoulders nice and relaxed and all we do now is we rotate our forearm in again 10 to 15 repetitions do three sets again you can do this daily just rotate in now normally i should turn around face the wall if i want to use the same arm i'm going to demonstrate this now with my left side so i've done thumb out to in and now obviously what i need to do it's not rocket science is it is thumb in to out so again my elbow should be nicely tucked into my side shoulders nice and relaxed and we're now going to rotate my thumb from in to out again i should normally face the other way i just want to demonstrate this to you yeah an easy exercise then the other exercise we need to do is just with the wrist we're now going to move the wrist to the outside here so with no movement in the forearm just moving with the wrist again i'm going to demonstrate this on the left side obviously for camera purposes so again elbow nicely fixated in the side thumb facing in and all we do now is remove the wrist out and in same thing 10 to 15 repetitions three sets always ensure that my elbow is nicely tucked into my side yeah and obviously also what we need to do is we need to do this movement yeah so when we move the the uh the hand inwards now so let me demonstrate it to you on my right side thumb is now facing inwards and all of them now again same thing elbow always tucked into your side and you're coming in and you're coming into the side and you repeat this again 10 15 times three sets great exercise for the wrist and the forearm and the last one we're going to do is we need to strengthen the muscles that do you this to your hand so with the tara band i'm coming outside over where my watches then i'm rotating and turning over my thumb and then taraband sits between my second and third knuckles you can see yeah second third knuckle then i'm standing upright make a fist and all i do now is i move my wrist uh upwards and down and if if you if the terabyte sits within the second or the third and the fourth uh knuckle what it means is you get a nice pull in the middle of your arm you got to be careful that the terabyte doesn't sit too much over your little finger over your thumb and then the pool is obviously a bit asymmetric which which is something we we don't want so we do this again 10 to 15 repetitions and repeat and repeat this about three times so those are really simple exercises to do to strengthen the muscles in your forearm and to help you with your carpal tunnel syndrome i hope you've enjoyed this video i hope there was a lot of value in this video for you if you know someone who's struggling with carpal tunnel syndrome don't hesitate and forward this video to them as well if you want to leave me a comment or give me a thumbs up or subscribe to my channel please do for now i'd like to say take care of yourself take care of someone else please as well if you can and bye for now bye-bye [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Milton Chiropractic Clinic Cambridge

Views: 20,290

Keywords: carpal tunnel syndrome exercises, carpal tunnel syndrome, carpal tunnel syndrome stretches, best stretches for carpal tunnel syndrome, CTS stretches, tests for carpal tunnel syndrome, best exercises for carpal tunnel syndrome, physio exercises for carpal tunnel syndrome, exercises for painful hand, exercises for tingling hand, exercises for tingling fingers, numb hand and fingers exercises

Id: 14ksmGsf6o0

Length: 13min 58sec (838 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 11 2022