One of the great joys of cricket is watching VVS Laxman or Mohammad Azharuddin execute their signature flick shot. A ball is coming in at the stumps, and with a late roll of the wrists, they flick it off the pads through midwicket to the boundary with almost no visible effort. It is not power in the arms or footwork that makes the shot. It is what two supple wrists can do in a fraction of a second. The wrist is a small joint capable of something close to magic, whether it is threading that flick, holding a surgeon’s needle or a painter’s brush, or simply turning a key in a lock. And, like most magic, we tend to notice it only when our wrists stop working the way the should (and some of us in Marcellus can testify how painful this can be). That is the warning at the heart of this useful new piece from David Cox. For all they can do, our wrists are surprisingly fragile, and most of us take them for granted until something goes wrong.
Cox writes from personal experience. A competitive tennis player in his youth, he picked up a wrist injury at 18 that “would plague me for years” and, nearly two decades on, has left him at greater risk of arthritis. His larger point is that wrist trouble is far more common in mid and later life than most of us assume, and that we ought to start thinking about it “earlier in life than you’d expect”.
All that capability rests on a surprisingly delicate piece of engineering. We tend to picture the wrist as a single joint; in fact, it is a cluster of eight small carpal bones, the two bones of the forearm and the bases of the bones in the palm, all held in what Andrew Abadeer, of the University of South Florida, calls a “very finely-tuned balance”. “When that goes awry,” he tells Cox, “that’s when wrist arthritis starts to develop.”
The trouble is that things go awry quietly. Sara Larsson, who studies wrist rehabilitation at Lund University, says the trigger can be as ordinary as a repetitive twist or a fall onto an outstretched hand. “I see many people who had an injury when they were young, everything appeared to be fine again, and then 20 years later, they develop problems.”
There is more at stake than the wrist itself. Abadeer describes it as a “sentinel joint”, an early warning system for the rest of the body. About half of all rheumatoid arthritis patients feel the disease there first, and grip strength turns out to be a decent proxy for overall health, frailty and even cognitive function in older age. For a reader inclined to think in decades, this is prevention as a long-term investment: small, dull, unglamorous deposits now against a much larger liability later.
So what to do? Cox lays out a simple, home-based routine drawn from the experts he speaks to, and the reassuring news is that none of it needs a gym. Larsson’s first, slightly counter-intuitive tip is to strengthen the shoulders, not just the hand. “You don’t just use your hand, you use the whole arm,” she says. “And if you’re weak in your shoulders, then you put more load on the wrist. But if you are strong, then you can protect and unload the wrist.”
From there it is grip work (squeezing a therapy ball or, failing that, a tennis ball), and gentle loaded flexing of the wrist with a light weight or a resistance band, which, Abadeer notes, does more than build muscle. “When they’re loaded, these bones strengthen and start to remodel, adding more strength to the wall of that bone.”Finally, slow rotations of the forearm to preserve the range of motion. Three sets of ten, three or four times a week, is the whole prescription.
Abadeer’s broader warning is that we now live in “a pronated world”, our hands frozen for hours over laptops and phones in a way our joints never evolved for. Cox’s own conclusion, after months without a working wrist, is one worth pinning up over the desk: it is only when you lose something that you realise its true importance.
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Note: The above material is neither investment research, nor financial advice. Marcellus does not seek payment for or business from this publication in any shape or form. The information provided is intended for educational purposes only. Marcellus Investment Managers is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and is also an FME (Non-Retail) with the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) as a provider of Portfolio Management Services. Additionally, Marcellus is also registered with US Securities and Exchange Commission (“US SEC”) as an Investment Advisor.
