How to Strengthen Your Wrists

Do you have dainty wrists? Wish that they were stronger? For good reason. Strong wrists help you:

–         Prevent wrist sprains

–         Improve your grip strength

–         Prevent other injuries

–         Save money on your car insurance

OK, I only threw that last one in there to see if you’re paying attention. Good catch.

Original source: here.

But there is one important challenge with wrist strengthening: the wrists are bones, not muscles. This affects your exercise program in a few ways.

–         Bones respond to exercise much slower than muscles. Whereas muscles can get stronger literally in a matter of a few days, bones can take months and years to get stronger.

–         The potential of muscles and bones to get stronger is vastly different. Whereas muscles can triple their strength (so if when you’re untrained you can lift 100 pounds, with training you have the potential to get up to 300 pounds. Yeah, it’ll take a lot of hard work and a lot of time, but it can be done). Bones can’t get 3 times thicker. Doctors are happy when they see a measly 6% increase in the bones in one year. They are positively amazed when they see an 11% increase in the bones in one year.

–         To compound the issue, many joints/bones have muscles all around them. The wrists are an exception. There’s really just skin, ligaments and tendons running through the wrist, so it’s not like you can even “bulk up” the wrists. You can make muscles bigger, but you can’t do that with skin, ligaments and tendons (not to any great extent, anyway).

Knowing these things, what can we do to strengthen the wrists?

What works for strengthening bones everywhere else in the body also works for the wrists. And that’s impact.

So daily grip on to something really hard. As hard as you can. That will force the tendons that attach to the wrist to pull hard on those bones, and as a result, they get stronger. Spread this throughout the day, and try to accumulate a total of 2-4 minutes per day of gripping something really hard.

Another method is punching something that is hard. There is nothing more potent to increase bone mass as much as impact. So if you jump up and down, it will really benefit your hips and lower back (and please don’t do this if your osteoporosis is very advanced. You may not be ready for jumping just yet), but won’t do that much for your wrists. So punch a solid object. Like a board or a wall. Of course, you won’t be able to punch hard at first, but go as hard as you can without hurting yourself. Over time, you’ll be able to increase your bone mass quite significantly as a result of this.

Original source: here.

These are just a few examples of how to strengthen your wrists. We actually have a proprietary 4-step program we use with our clients to strengthen their bones. If you’d like our help, let us know.