Four exercises, done in short bursts many times a day, cover most of what a recovering hand needs.
Not twenty.
The sheet with twenty exercises is the reason people do none of them, and volume is not what makes hand rehab work — frequency is.
Five minutes, six times a day, beats thirty minutes once. Tissue responds to being asked often.
The four
1. Tendon glides. From a flat hand, move through four shapes: hook fist (knuckles straight, the other two joints bent), full fist, tabletop (knuckles bent, fingers straight), straight fist. Hold each two seconds. Ten cycles. These keep the two flexor tendons in each finger moving independently rather than sticking together as a block, which is exactly what happens after swelling or surgery.
2. Full fist and full extension. Squeeze as far as comfort allows, then open as wide as possible with the fingers straight and spread. Ten repetitions. Sounds trivial. It is the single best measure of whether you are getting your hand back.
3. Blocked joint bending. Hold the middle section of one finger still with the other hand and bend only the tip. Then hold the base section and bend only the middle joint. Ten each, on any finger that is stiff. This is how you recover an individual joint rather than letting the neighbors do the work.
4. Wrist and forearm. Wrist up and down, side to side, and — most importantly — palm fully up and fully down with the elbow tucked at your side. Ten each. Rotation is the movement most often left short and the one that matters most for daily tasks.
Short and often. A hand does not stiffen because you did too little in one session; it stiffens because it sat still for six hours.
The two things that go with the exercises
- Elevation, with the fingers moving while the hand is up. Swelling is what turns a recovering hand into a stiff one — see swelling and oedema after a hand injury
- Moving the joints nobody mentioned. Shoulder and elbow, daily. A stiff shoulder after a hand or wrist injury is common, avoidable and annoying to fix
When strength comes in
Last, and later than people want. Range first, then endurance, then strength. Squeezing putty into a hand that cannot yet make a full fist just trains the hand to grip in a shortened position.
A rough order once movement is comfortable: soft sponge, then soft putty, then firmer putty, then everyday resisted tasks. Spring grippers are usually far too heavy for a recovering hand and are rarely the right starting point.
How hard is too hard
- Discomfort during and shortly after: expected. Stiff tissue complains when it is asked to move
- Soreness that settles within an hour: fine. Progress at this level
- Soreness still there the next morning, or more swelling than yesterday: too much. Halve it
- Sharp pain, or a sensation of something giving: stop and get it checked
When these are the wrong exercises
This page is general.
Some situations have a specific protocol that overrides everything here, and doing generic exercises instead can cause real damage:
- After a flexor tendon repair. The most protocol-driven rehab in hand therapy, and the repair is weakest at around week 3 when it starts to feel fine. Follow your surgeon’s and therapist’s protocol exactly
- After an extensor tendon repair, or with mallet finger. Bending the joint at the wrong stage undoes the repair and restarts the clock
- Any fracture not yet confirmed as stable
- A finger that will not straighten at all, which needs assessment rather than exercise
If your hand has already gone stiff, the stiff hand after a cast, splint or operation covers what to do about it, and after a wrist fracture specifically, the weeks after the cast comes off sets out the sequence.
Four exercises you actually do beat twenty you read once.
Every article on this site is written using the Closing Window Method: name the window your condition runs on, find where you are in it, and act while it’s still open.