Simple, but Powerful, Fascia Release Exercises for Hands and Feet

Self-Care; Pain Relief; Health and Wellbeing.

Recently, I wrote about the role of the hands and feet in chronic conditions, and in health and wellbeing more generally:

The Hands and Feet as Portals into Our Nervous System

In that article, we discussed how the fascia [connective tissue] of the hands and feet are very common problem areas. According to Deanna Hansen, inventor of the Block Therapy fascia release self-care modality,

What Fascia Decompression and "Block Therapy" Did For Me

the fascia of these extremities is often very stiff, dehydrated, and adhering [stuck down] to the underlying bone. This is especially the case in chronic conditions, which is not helped by poor circulation, or being cold, as the hands and feet are the furthest places from the “furnace”of the diaphragmatic breath. Indeed, problems with the fascia there is manifestly apparent in folks with many chronic conditions, such as those who have a Parkinson’s diagnosis, where the hands and feet can be very stiff, and the fingers and toes become painfully curled or claw like. I suspect that many cases of arthritis like issues are also mainly due to problems with the fascia here.

Since fascia forms a single connective web throughout the body, the tightness and stiffness of the fascia in the extremities will also have knock-on and non-local effects elsewhere in the “kinetic chain” of the body. Problems in the hands will pull the arms, shoulders and neck, and hence head, out of alignment. Problems with the feet will cause knock-on problems with knees and pelvis, and pull the whole posture out of alignment.

The hands and feet are therefore prime candidate “cause sites” for problem and pains all over the body, and hence are primary areas to focus fascia release care.

Recently, Deanna and her colleague Quinn Castelane made a couple of youtube videos about this, which have gone a bit viral. In these videos, they demonstrate and discuss some simple, but powerful, fascia release exercises to help release the hands and fingers, and the feet and toes.

I thought it was well worth highlighting these exercise tips, and bringing them to the attention of my readers to try for themselves, due to the very powerful, sometimes near miraculous, results Deanna and clients describe in the videos.

The exercise for the hands is simply to push the gaps between the same fingers of each hand together, as shown in the pictures above and below. So slot the gaps between the thumb and forefinger together, then slot the gaps between the forefingers and middle fingers, etc. In each of the four positions, push together firmly enough that you get some intense but bearable levels of pain in the “webbed” part between the fingers [the pain indicates you are hitting the spot] and hold each position for 3 minutes.

For the feet, insert a finger between each of the gaps of the toes and again push in to the webbed area between the toes towards the feet. Again hold the pressure, enough to generate some intense, but bearable pain between each toe for 3 minutes. You can also do this with a pen or pencil as shown in the image below, rather than using a finger.

Try doing this once a day for a week and see if you notice any definite change [you should notice things feel very different in the immediate aftermath of doing these exercises].

The beauty of this exercise you can do it anywhere [well, the hand version at least], while watching the TV, say. It also something you can do on, and for, other people, for whom other self-care fascia release exercises may be difficult, e.g. very immobile people, folks with dementia, etc. Indeed, in Walter Kells’s video testimonial above, he describes some remarkable near instantaneous results he has got on doing this on his very elderly father, and Deanna reciprocates with a story of the profound results she got on doing it on client who had had a major stroke.