How to do a Wrist Stretch for Gymnastics

"Hi, I'm Mandy Butler on behalf of Expert Village. I'm going to take you through a gymnastics class stretch and warm-up. Now I'm going to stretch my wrists. This is so important. A lot of people forget to stretch their wrists and they have injuries from tumbling and pounding those joints. If you're doing round-offs, cartwheels, and especially back hand springs, you're putting a lot of stress on your wrists. So, I tell my athletes, clap their hands together, open them like a book and then place their hands down so their fingers are facing toward their knees. Now, notice that my hands are not this far away from me because that's really going to put too much stress on you. Put your hands close to your body and just rock your weight backward until you start to feel that stretch right here in these tendons. So, I'm going to lean backward, I'm going to hold that for about 20 seconds and then I'm going to rotate my wrists so they look like butterflies and I'm going to gently, very gently rock side to side. Then, I'm going to put my fingers away from me and lean forward. I'm going to repeat this same stretch by flipping my palms upward. Now, this is very, very important to do slowly because you could really injure yourself if you try to push it too hard. I'm going to put my fingers toward each other and do the same thing, rock side to side. Fingers away from each other. Then I'm going to roll my wrists around to really get them loose because I've just stretched them out so much. And that's how we get our wrists ready for gymnastics."