Exercise with RA: Strengthening Exercises

To strengthen muscles, they must be overloaded using some kind of resistance. Even working against gravity, such as climbing the stairs is working against resistance. And so it will help to strengthen your muscles. Strengthening exercises should be done in a controlled way. Start with a low number of repetitions and resistance and build up gradually. It's normal to get some muscle soreness when you have overloaded them, especially if they're not used to it. These exercises are designed to strengthen the muscles in your arms and hands. This is an exercise to strengthen the muscles in your hand. We call it a Power Grip exercise. So you can use putty like this, you pick it up in your hands and play with it. Squeeze it, hold it for a couple of seconds and then squeeze it again. You keep moving it around your hands getting all of your fingers and your thumb involved. - Squeeze in. - It's so gooey. It does, doesn't it? Now these can be different strengths. So use one that you find easy enough to squeeze. Yeah, this is one that's a little bit hard. This is really soft, if you want to try this one. - Is that better? - Yes. So that you make some bends in it and shapes in it. The other alternative, if you don't have any putty at home, grab a pair of socks and try squeezing something like that or maybe even a silk scarf and get your hands on it, or both hands on it. Squeeze it. Make sure you use both hands eventually. There's all sorts of things at home you can use. So if you rest your forearms on the edge of the table, so your wrist is overhanging and unsupported. Now slowly pull your wrist up towards you, extending it high as you can and then slowly lower back down for five seconds. All the way down. And again, pulling back up, extend your wrist as far as you can, stretch and lower back down. So the whole movement takes about five seconds from start to finish. If you want to make this exercise harder, when you pull up, hold at the top of the movement for a couple of seconds before you lower back down again. So to make this exercise harder, you could hold on to a light bottle of water, slowly pull your wrist up as far as you can and then lower back down. The whole movement should take you about five seconds to do. If you want to make the exercise a little bit easier, you could do fewer repetitions or turn your arm on inside and try in that position instead. That's it. That way you're not using gravity. It's much easier 'cause I've had surgery on my wrist. So this one suits you better. Either are good, just depends on the person. So this next exercise is for static wrist extension. You place one palm down on the table, put your other hand on top of it, and I want you to try and pull the underhand up whilst pushing it back down with the other one. And you feel the muscles in your forearm tense up. Just hold that there for a couple of seconds and then relax, and repeat again. Does it matter if you shake? No, it means you're working harder. Obviously, if you have any pain when you're doing it, make it a bit softer. That's perfect, then repeat on the other side. Pulling up and pushing down at the same time.