5 Exercises To Help Strengthen Your Wrists For Yoga Practice

There are some days when I’m in the middle of a pose, usually Downward Facing Dog or Plank when I feel slight discomfort in my wrists and I find that I can’t hold the pose for as long as I know I can because my upper arms can’t bear the weight of my body.

Admittedly it doesn’t happen very often but when it does happen I have to come out of the pose or adapt it by bringing my knees down to the floor or rest in child’s pose. In yoga we do a lot of poses that extend the wrist and put pressure on our joints, Downward Facing Dog, Plank, Cobra and Upward Facing Dog are all examples of this and one of the main causes of wrist injuries when doing yoga is poor alignment.

I always know in the first ten to twenty seconds if I’m going to struggle with a pose because my wrist will feel weak and I will begin to feel tension in my neck and shoulders and that’s when I have to take a closer look at my alignment and hand placement.

Our wrists are made up of eight small bones called the carpal bones and the two bones in our lower arm the radius and ulna meet at the hand to form the wrist. The radius as I found out recently thanks to a king size poster of the anatomy at the gym is larger than the ulna and can therefore bear more weight than the ulna and this is why hand placement is so important when doing poses that are going to put pressure on our wrists and lower arms.

When going into poses such as Downward Facing Dog, Plank and Chaturanga we need to ensure we ‘ground’ through our thumbs and index fingers and our hands are shoulder width apart. The fingertips of our remaining fingers should be ‘clawing’ the mat and this will cause our forearm to rotate inwards and our arms and shoulder blades to go back so there will be an inward rotation of the lower arm and an outward rotation of the upper arm. This hand placement will help take the pressure off our wrists.

There are many yoga poses that can help us strengthen our wrists but there are also a number of exercises that can help us prepare ourselves before we even hit the mat.

Hand Turn 1: Circles

This first hand turn is one we do quite naturally and one I always turn to if I feel any discomfort in my wrists during practice, standing or sitting hold your hands out in front of you, palms facing each other and circle your hands in a clockwise then anti-clockwise direction.

Hand Turn 2: Palms Up

This is one I do a lot especially if I’ve been typing on the laptop or scrolling for long periods of time. Place your hands on the desk or table palms facing upwards and ensure your fingers and wrists are straight and resting on the table. Slowly turn your palm up as far as it can comfortably go, hold and release. Repeat up to ten times.

Clenched Fist

Resting the side of your hand on a table or out in front of you clench your fist lightly, hold and straighten your fingers. Repeat four or five times on one hand then repeat the sequence with the other hand.

Ball Squeeze

This is one of my favourites, grip a tennis ball or stress ball firmly in the palm of your hand, hold then release and repeat ten times.

Wrist Curls

This is an exercise I learnt from a personal trainer and is similar to a bicep curl but for your wrists. From a seated position take two 1kg weights in your hands. Starting with your wrists over your knees with your palms facing downwards, very slowly ‘curl’ your wrists up, hold, then release them down.

Now turn your hands over so your palms are facing upwards and ‘curl’ your wrists towards you, hold and release.