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Let us understand the anatomy aspect of wrist. Using a wrist from a anatomical perspective can help us to use a wrist in a very efficient way, not just for yoga but also in daily life. We can protect our wrist joints by practicing deliberate and control movements. It is important to keep the wrist joint in action, that means flexion as well as extension.

In other words, we need to keep them moving, that keeps them healthy and mobility is maintained. The mobility maintains the fluidity of the sinusoidal joint. This sinusoid fluid nourishes and lubricates the joint. It can also calcify, that is it can get hardened or ossify, that it turns into bones.

It might constrict our range of movement, emotion. If we take a closer look at the anatomy, the wrist are formed with two forearm bones, the radius and the Allah. They meet at the wrist joint, where there is cluster of small bones, that is, carpal bones. The carpal bones connect with five long bones, that is metacarpal bones.

It makes up the palm of your hand. From there, the metacarpal bone connect to the bones of the fingers, that is also known as falanges. The carpal bone form a tunnel through which the tendon and nerve tissue passes, to service the hand and fingers. Let us understand the inner wrist or the radial hand.

The radial hand, the thumb, index and the middle finger connect to some of the carpal bones and eventually they connect to the radial. The radial is much broader than the Allah at the wrist. Therefore, it can bear more weight than the Allah. So the best cue would be, press down the between the thumb and the index finger.

Now let us talk about the ulnar hand, the pinky and the ring finger on the other side, connect to the triquatrium and paciform bone, which are also part of the carpal bones and ultimately connect to the Allah. As the Allah is rather narrow and small wrist, it is not meant to bear much weight. The Allah hand is a weak network of bones and frustratingly tends to bear the brunt of the whole body weight. So whenever you are practicing, see that the weight is coming more on the radius, the index finger and the middle finger.

The bones of the wrist are organized so that the strongest bone transfer weight from the mounts of the thumb and the index and the middle finger directly to the radius, which is the stronger of the two bones of the forearm. The radius in turn transfers the weight to the upper arm bones, the humerus, which sits directly on the top of the radius and does to the shoulder girdle. By contrast, the ring and the little finger connect to the bone in the heel of the hand, the called the paciform as we discussed earlier, which you can feel as a small but prominent bump at the heel of your hand. The ulnar is not meant to be directly weight-bearing but facilitates the rotation of the forearm.

The ulnar artery and the ulnar nerve pass through a space just to the inside of the paciform protected by small sheet of fascia. If we consistently put weight on the heel of the hand, we not only irritate the soft tissue of the wrist causing them to swell but risk damaging the wrist by putting pressure on this nerve. The sensitive carpal tunnel, the center of the wrist can be inflamed as well. The hand is simply not built to take the weight here.

In order to protect and strengthen the wrist and the whole palm of the hand, when the palm is on the floor, the greater part of your weight should be directly not to the heel of the hand but to the mounts of the fingers, particularly to the mounts of the index finger. By pressing down the mounts, you are engaging the underside of the forearm. If the wrist are weak or injured, they need to be progressively stretched and strengthened with a series of exercises. In the third part, we will talk about various alignment cues that we do not have wrist injuries in planks or any other forearm balance.

See you in the third and the last part of this series. Take care, keep smiling, Namaste.