I had this persistent injury. My left wrist kept moving out of place. I would be fine one day, then completely unable to bend my wrist the next. It was fine if I was practicing Plank, but it was horribly painful whenever I tried to type on my computer. Although it took me a little bit of trouble-shooting, I finally figured out the cause of my wrist injury and how to fix it! Read on to discover how to fix a hand/wrist injury.

How to Fix a Hand/Wrist Injury

Even if your hand/wrist injury is different from mine, you can still follow these easy steps to possibly fix your issue. However, if you believe that you have broken a bone or seriously injured a muscle, do not attempt to fix this issue by yourself! In these cases, it is imperative that you contact your doctor immediately and seek help. This advice is only for people with small, annoying issues not for people with debilitating pain issues.

1. Assess your issue.

In my situation, my first issue that I observed was that I couldn’t bend my wrist and move my fingers toward the inside of my forearm. There wasn’t pain; it just wouldn’t budge. I was certain there was a bone in my wrist out of place, so I went to the chiropractor.

She confirmed that I did have a bone out of place, and she put it back in. I figured that my problem was solved, but that wasn’t the case. If you don’t change what you were doing to cause your injury the first time, no amount of chiropractic adjustments will get your correct alignment to hold. You have to figure out what you were doing to cause your injury, and stop doing it.

After the chiropractor put my wrist back in place, it was about a day before it popped out again. I started to pay attention to what I was doing. I noticed that I was really stretching my left pinkie a lot. It reaches for the Shift and Control buttons when I type and, for some odd reason, it is the main support for my phone when I’m reading off the screen.

I decided to quit stressing my left pinkie finger. This meant holding a more level and neutral hand placement while I was typing and using the rest of my hand to support my phone while I was reading.

2. Do research.

Although these improvements helped my hand/wrist stay in place for longer, it slipped out again after a handful of days. It just so happened that while I was trying to figure out what else I was doing to make my wrist move out of place, I was researching and writing about various muscles in the hand.

My jaw dropped when I started reading about the flexor digiti minimi brevis and abductor digiti minimi muscle in the hands. The origin for the flexor digiti minimi brevis hand muscle is on a hook-shaped bone in the wrist. This muscle helps you bend your little finger (like when you’re typing on a keyboard). The abductor digiti minimi helps you reach your little finger away from the other fingers (like when you’re reaching for the Shift or Control keys).

3. Determine the cause.

Based off of the muscles that I identified as the root cause of my issue, I would say that my keyboarding hand posture was most likely the main cause of my issue. However, as I thought about it more, I discovered that there were other issues that compounded my injury.

• When I would spread my fingers for yoga poses like Downward facing dog, I was unintentionally spreading my pinkie farther away than the other fingers.
• Because of how my wedding ring fits, my left pinkie finger doesn’t ever have the opportunity to completely adduct toward my ring finger. Instead, my wedding band forces a space.
• My left side sleeping posture sometimes involves twisting and pinning my wrist under my body.

4. Perform therapy.

Once you discover what is causing your injury, you can move forward with your therapy. As long as you have a minor issue (like I did), there’s no reason that you can’t successfully perform your therapy yourself.

When you find the muscle that is at the root of your injury, find out everything you can about it. Where does it originate and insert? What does it do? Use these answers to help you create your own therapy.

Massage the points of origin and insertion. Try your best to massage along the muscle. Then, it’s time for exercises. In my case, I made the conscious decision to remove my wedding band once a day so I could adduct my little finger to my ring finger. It was amazing how difficult and therapeutic it felt to squeeze those fingers together!

I also made the conscious decision to adjust my hand placement while typing. Instead of always relying on my little finger to jump all over the board, I started letting my whole left hand slide to the side so I wouldn’t overstretch my little finger as often.

If you are trying to fix a hand/wrist injury, I hope that these tips help. Lots of times, our more annoying injuries are caused by things that we are unintentionally doing to ourselves. What’s important is to figure out where you’re going wrong and make changes accordingly.

Have you ever had to fix a hand/wrist injury? What did you do? Let us know in the comments below.

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