Combating Carpal Tunnel With Yoga

Series Summary

Carpal tunnel syndrome is a painful, numbing, and or weakening condition of the hand and wrist that occurs when the median nerve is compacted. A number of contributing factors may cause carpal tunnel syndrome, including: a genetic predisposition, work stress, trauma, fluid retention during pregnancy, hypothyroidism, repetitive use of power hand tools, long term stress, cyst development in the hand or wrist, diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis. Perhaps the most common cause in the computer age is extended hours at the keyboard.

In order to find a cure for this predominantly modern affliction, we turn to the ancient healing system of yoga. Our expert yoga instructor offers several exercises to relieve your carpal tunnel aches and pains. Learn how to massage hands, forearm arm and shoulders to ease the tension in these areas. You will also learn finger, wrist and shoulder stretches to limber up stress points and exercises such as the downward dog pose and wrist push-ups to build muscle mass.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Sherry Smith with Serenity Stream Yoga and Wellness in Tampa, Florida. On behalf of Expert Village, I'm here to show you how to go ahead and do some yoga postures on carpal tunnel. Carpal tunnel is a disorder that affects about 41% of the work-related workforce. It affects both with repetitive motion and with misalignment. So I'm going to show you some poses on how to correct your alignment, and be able to bring this into your everyday life so that you can prevent or help carpal tunnel, if you have carpal tunnel syndrome yourself. What carpal tunnel is, is like I said, a misalignment of your body, and then you're repetitive motion, what happens is if you get swelling in your arm and it presses against the nerve, and so you're getting numbness. Eventually it can lead to some nerve damage. So we're going to try to prevent that in the next coming clips. "