HANDS: why they aren't quite feet
Rediscover your hands through the touch of your eyes as well as the touch of your fingers, and rethink how you bring them into weight-bearing.
Do you find yourself (or see others) circling wrists after doing table-top movements? It’s a natural reaction to release compression in the tiny joints of the hand because this limb has evolved away from being a weight-bearing structure. Let’s see if there is anything we can do to alleviate this experience for while the anatomy of our hand resembles that of our feet, the bones of the wrist are like tiny pebbles in comparison to the small rocks of our ankles.
1. MAPPING THE TERRITORY
Mapping is such a useful technique for connecting to your own anatomy. Simple touch, first with your eyes to see the shape and contours of your hand: the back of the hand revealing a delta of vessels flowing from your wrist, the bony mounds of the knuckles as you flex and ripple your fingers and thumbs. Then turning your hand over to see the soft cup of your palm, the creases and threads of fate lines, the pads of your fingers that bear your unique print.
The first mapping is also about feeling, rather than thinking. Observing your hands and what they say about you and the life-lived so far. Reflecting on the stories they hold, what tasks they enjoy, what skills they have learned, what kindness they have offered, what fears they have gripped.
The second way of mapping is to find an anatomical picture as your guide and use one hand to feel your way around the other. Use different kinds of touch: a light stroke to feel the skin and the structures just below the surface, then perhaps a firmer touch or light pinching to get to know the shape of the bones and the movement that happens inside the joints. You might name the places on your map: the bones, the types of movement.
Here are a few images to help you find your way around the territory of your hands.
2. HANDS ARE NOT FEET
If you were to look at the anatomy of a quadruped, a horse for example, you would see that the bones of the four limbs are very similar in shape and size, and while it is effectively standing on what for us would be the tip-toes of all its four feet, each limb is able to share in the task of weight-bearing. The forelimb anatomy of most primates much more resembles our own arm and hand, although they are more adept at bearing weight on them evidenced in their ability to move at varying speeds on all-fours over ground and climbing.
If you look at the bones of your arms and your legs, you will see striking similarities, however, the limbs have evolved for different purposes. As a bipedal being, most of us move through the world on our feet, and stand on the earth through our legs. Our arms and hands have evolved to be non-weight-bearing.
When you next place your hands on the ground to support weight, there are a few things you can consider to reduce the effort placed on the architecture of your wrists:
try to put aside “stacking" your shoulders over your wrist and instead position the crease of your wrist forward of your shoulder to redirect the angles of force traveling through the bones and joints
remember your hand can never be wholly flat, there will always be a hollow in your palm, encourage your awareness of this hollow and lift through that space a little like the way you lift thorugh the arches of your feet in standing
experiment with reducing the space between your fingers so that all your metacarpal (hand bones) and phalanges (finger bones) align; when you “spread” your fingers wide, you disrupt these lines of force.
FINDING THE GROUND
Let’s back track a little. Before you even think of organising the location of your hands in relation to your shoulders, or make choices about how to space the fingers, you have to bring your hands to the floor. How are you doing that?
Consider the hands like feet, which have a particular way of meeting the ground in your gait: the heel strike, the transfer of weight along the little-toe edge of your foot then across to the ball, and then the toe-off.
Slow down and be thoughtful about placing your hands. Try starting with the heel of the hand (the pad on the little finger side of you palm) and rolling the weight across the base of the fingers sequentially (little finger to index finger), allowing the fingers to settle in the same sequence, and then land the thumb. Peel them away, by ‘toeing-off’ from the base of the index finger. (I’ll pop a video clip in the Companion Notes to illustrate).
A DIALOGUE WITH GROUND
Are you propping on your hands and arms? Propping is that feeling of depositing all the weight from your shoulders into the floor, with discomfort showing up quickly as the joints start to suffocate under the pressure. It’s a one-way relationship and they are never good!
The answer is to bring your body into dialogue with the Earth’s language of gravity by honing your skills of Yield and Push. Put simply, as the weight of your body descends through your arms and hands (yield), respond with an action of push into the ground so that you create a kind of ‘rebound’ back up through your bones. It can feel as if your bones become more dense and strong, more clear in their presence. Experiment with different amounts of ‘push’. What you need can vary according to the shape you are making, table-top yield and push is different to Downward Dog, and different again in arm-balances.
INFANT MOVEMENT DEVELOPMENT
In the movement journey from baby to toddler, there is a usually a crawling stage before we fulfill our desire to stand-up in the world. Not all of us go through the text-book sequence of developmental patterns, however, and for a number of reasons we might skip crawling and weight-bearing on our arms and hands altogether. I’ll expand more in the Companion Notes.
In the meantime, do revisit crawling both forwards and backwards, even if it is just within the confines of a yoga mat. It’s an extremely interesting contralateral movement that creates a spiral motion through your spine. Remember to think about the gait motion of your hands. And if space is not available, or coming to the floor is not possible, or your movement possibilities are different to mine, then try to find an opportunity to observe the gait of a dog, or a cat, or a horse. Watch the co-ordination of the limbs and then widen your attention to follow the movement of the spine.
That’s it for now. I hope you’ve enjoyed this focus on your hands. I’ll expand a little more on the antaomy and movement patterns in the Companion Notes, dip into “hasta mudras” (hand gestures/seals), and also unpack more somatic associations for you to explore creatively.
Thank you for reading,
Beverley