Clint shows some practical tips to quickly reduce finger swelling, that you can easily apply throughout the day.

Finger swelling. If we’re sitting at our desk, then what we can tend to experience is a lot of inactivity, except typing, and inflammation in these circumstances can build up. It’s like a mini version of morning stiffness where we lay inactive throughout the night and through that inactivity, what happens is we end up developing more lodged swelling, more stiffness and so on. So if we’re at our desk and we’re inactive, there are some simple exercises that we can do without looking too weird. If we’re in a public place with colleagues in a shared work environment and certainly things that you can do at home where you’ve got the privacy of working from your own office and so on.

Three things that you want to do relate to just getting blood flow and some release of the tight tendons around the fingers. And so the first one, very simply, is to flare the hand as much as you can backward. So that involves all of the connective tissue behind the hand, on the back of the hand, and pulling as hard as you can. Now, this engages while that engagement of the tendons on the back of the hand pulls these fingers backward and really gets a good stretch, which I can feel even though I do this regularly. Getting a good stretch through here all the way, even through this section as well. Holding this counteracts all of the impact of doing this all the time, which is what we do driving a car, holding a pen, eating our food, knife and fork, and so on. And so working backward and doing this gives a great stretch because the inflammation that gets caught in these knuckles here and also can here occur in those back of the knuckles, there tends to have a downward pulling effect. The fingers can claw and come inwards and become there permanently so this helps to reverse that.

We’re going to take that to another level and we’re now actually going to reach into the soft tissue, not the joint. Okay. Not the joint, but the soft tissue and pull that down. And so we’re not applying any pressure at all into the joint. We’re just stretching each one of our fingers by applying pressure to the soft tissue. Completely non-problematic for swelling and inflammation in the joints, and apply that going through to each one of these. This is just more encouragement through the tendons that become tight in the same manner as the first one but how we’re applying pressure and having a much more deeper impact on that.

The third thing we’re going to do is not very intuitive, but what it involves is actually flexing, as you would after you’re pretty proud of yourself scoring a goal or you’re at the gym or something. And so I literally want you to flex like this. Why would we do that? Well, first of all, let’s talk about how to do it. So we want to flex like we would at the gym, and I want you to squeeze really hard through those elbows and hold it. You’ll feel it, you’ll feel it through the elbows. They will feel tight, and you want to actually get it. You feel a triceps, biceps contraction, really, really squeeze it. And when you do that for about, let’s say, about 10 seconds as hard as you can and really, really engage it, then when you release, I want you to do that with me now. And when you release, you’ll feel a pressure reduction and a warmth through the elbows, but you’ll notice as well a movement through your fingers that’s enhanced. Now, it’s remained a little mysterious to me over the years as to why that happens, but it always happens. I think it’s related to blood flow so we’ve got to increase blood flow after the tourniquet effect, the blood’s cut off at the elbow or restricted at the elbow to non-capacity. Then we have this flow of blood, and that just seems to just in a colloquial way, to seem the lubricating effect through to the finger joints.

And so several of those throughout the day, coupled with the backhand squeeze and then the finger squeeze can really leave the end of your workday with a much less consequential outcome than if you just sit type and you don’t do any of those things. So I’d encourage you to do those things and let me know how you go post in the comments below. If you’re looking for a program that incorporates not just how to reverse inflammation in the fingers but takes care of all the aspects of inflammatory arthritis reversal, head over to www.RheumatoidSolutions.com where we’ve got a complete program there coupled into the membership.

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