Show of Hands

Turning attention to your hands will bring you both cosmetic and health benefits. From the lofty perspective, hands are a symbol of social and intimate relations, spiritual connection, work, progress and protection. Contemplating all that hands can represent, we can say they are truly a universal metaphor. There’s like a good neighbor, I wanna hold your hand, let’s shake on it, lend me a hand, raise your hand, greasing his palms, blood on her hands, a clenched fist, a gentle caress, stop in the name of love, peek a boo, applause applause, high fives, pointing fingers, all hands in a cheer of team unity. Do we agree? Let’s have a show of hands.

Pick Two Things (& Ten Things): Your Hands (& Fingers)
Hands are one of the most used parts of your body for active everyday living, so the way they feel and the way they look is likely to vary depending on what you do with them. Over time, hands will have seen a lot of sun on top of a lot of action. So they do tend to reveal our age, along with our habits and activities. There are some things you might want to do to help your hands out in the cosmetic department. Then again, not all hands are meant to be models.

Guitar players have beloved calluses on their fingers, for example, and if they play Spanish guitar, they have long nails on the string-plucking hand and short nails on the other. Carpenters and outdoors men tend to have rough hands, with calluses on the palms. You can tell the difference when you shake a rock climbers hand versus a pianists hand. People without a lot of body fat might have rather veiny hands, especially as they get older and their skin thins; while people with extra body fat might have plump hands with hardly any lines at all. All that falls in the range of good and fine, but for those who want to go a bit further, I do have a couple of ideas that can help anyone along with the appearance of their hands.

Handy Suggestions
~My sister in law donned those big yellow gloves for washing dishes and other harsher household chores for years. We’re the same age, but her hands look way better than mine.

~ My friend swears by cuticle oil. In fact, she is addicted to it. It became a self-care ritual for her to use cuticle oil to soften and push back her cuticles, and then to moisturize and give gleam to her nails. Gotta admit, she has nice looking, handsomely groomed nails that even a truck driver could benefit from.

~ If you put lotion with sunscreen on your face each day as prevention, why not rub it on your hands, too? If you have a nighttime anti-aging routine for your face, you could use that on your hands as well.

~ Quit biting your nails and biting your skin. One great way to break the habit is to start taking care of your hands. With the soft skin and cuticle oil and lotion tricks mentioned above, you’ll find that it’s nice to look down and see good hands, instead stubby ragged ones. I used a mental tricks to help me quit. First, every time I caught myself biting my nails or skin, I stopped, rested my hands in my lap and thought, “hands, be still, be cool.”

That was what I wanted to feel and how I wanted to look, so it worked to remind me of what my intentions were. I kept thinking how bad it looked if I were caught gnawing away at my hands, say… in a waiting room for a job interview, or by a cute guy from across the room (I was young and single then). It really worked.

The Hand You’re Dealt
Can you improve your hands in any way besides cosmetically? Sure you can, at least a little.

~ You can strengthen your grip and squeeze strength. Functional movements will do this to a certain extent, as in tennis players and roofers tend to have strong hands. But simple gripping and squeezing exercises will work for those wanting something extra. Say, you want to register your hands as lethal weapons. Or you want to rip a deck of cards in half. Check out a training forum specifically for strong hands (and forearms, because those are related): http://www.bccorefitness.com/seriouslystronghands.html

~ You can increase the agility and quickness of your hands, too. Again, practice makes perfect. Take up guitar or piano or a woodwind instrument like clarinet or flute. You’ll get better at it the better your hands get at moving about quickly in a relatively small span of space and time.

~ Artsy endeavors beyond music will also help you with your hands. Hair braiding can encourage hand finesse, as can crocheting and knitting, paper crafting, oil painting, and calligraphy.

~ How about court reporters and data entry personnel? Them are fast hands. Learning to type and typing often helps keep your finger joints fluid.

On the other hand, there’s that darn repetitive motion syndrome to consider. And good ole arthritis. Joint pain, swelling, numbness, vascular constriction—all of these are the unfortunate symptoms of the dark side of having skilled and active hands.

Helping Hands
~ I started taking a couple of triple strength glucosamine and chondroitin tablets, once a day, a few years ago, and my hands are VERY much better off for it. I had early onset (in my 40s) of arthritis pain, stiffness and swelling in my knuckles and thumb joints, to the point where waking up some mornings I looked like I had been the product of a human/lobster mating. The glucosamine might not have tons of university research proving its effectiveness in humans, but it definitely works for dogs, and for me, so if you (or your dogs) suffer, maybe give it a try.

~ I also recently began supplementing with daily digestive enzymes. For digestion aid, mostly, but in particular I wanted to be more efficient in digesting proteins. And now, I’m certain I am. The addition of bromelein and papain further relieved my joint and hand pain (and my wrists, and knees and neck feel better too, by the way) to the point of I hardly remember that I have this arthritis to deal with. (Except I still stink at tennis.)

I now recover from my workouts better and feel better in my tummy when I eat extra protein. All good. I can’t vouch for these things medically, as I’m not a doctor, but I can tell you they help me. Enough to make me want to learn more about how and why and what else we can do with natural enzymes at our fingertips.

Here’s a book that leads to a list of others that I’ll be checking out in the next year: http://www.amazon.com/Enzymes-Digestive-Health-Nutritional-Wealth/dp/0972591869

In the meantime, put your hands in your own good hands. Pamper them a little, or pump them up, or both. They help you hold on to all good things in your life.