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Thumb Pain Relief: 3 Exercises You’re Missing
- chelsie462
- 1 hour ago
- 11 min read
This article is a transcribed, edited summary of a video Bob and Brad recorded in November 2024. For the original video, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPTm_5hq1so&t=12s
Brad: Man, the older I get, the worse my thumb hurts when I try to open the door.
Mike: You are old. Anyway, if you're dealing with thumb pain, we're going to show you some good remedies.
Brad: That's right. Plus, we're going to show you three exercises to strengthen it, so this type of thing doesn't happen in the future. It's one of those things that gets missed a lot in these videos with thumb problems.
Mike: You're getting closer to me.
Brad: Alright. The thumb, thumb pain. We're going to go back in time a little bit because we have a video that Bob and I made that is excellent. It's the best one on YouTube describing the anatomy and how the thumb works. Then we're going to come back and show you how to fix it and strengthen it.
Mike: And we're so bad at time travel, we're going to use Dr. Who to help us right now.
Brad: Oh, Dr. Who?
Brad: So we're going to start, there's a little bone down here called the trapezium, and then the next one is your metacarpal, and then your phalange joint's up here. Not that you need to know that, but this joint down here could easily get missed.
Bob: Yeah, and that is the one that I often see a lot of people have arthritis there.
Brad: That's right.
Bob: And it gets irritated, and it's the one that really bothers them.
Brad: That's the one that allows your thumb to really have, you can do circles with your thumb very easily, and you work different motions, biplanar, we call it.
Bob: You should not look at it, Brad. You should show them while you're doing this.
Brad: Well, I didn't know which way they could see better, Bob, but that's a good point. So the first one, if you just take your thumb and go to your pinky, if you can go like this and touch your thumb to your pinky, we're getting one direction of that joint, and it's all working down in here. Right down in there. And you can do 10 to 15 reps of that. If it needs little help you when and you can't touch, you can help, and you can squeeze it, give a little, what we call passive range of motion. If it hurts, just bump into the pain and repeat that, okay?
Brad: And as it goes out, you want to make sure you can open it up as well. And I'm pressing this direction to get that joint to go the opposite direction.
Brad: So we're going this way and close it to the pinky and close it, and then we can give a little pressure and open it. The next one is thumb to the pointer finger. That would be the second digit. And we're going to, so you can't bring your finger to the thumb that's cheating. You have to try to keep the finger.
Bob: Bring the thumb to the finger. Yep.
Brad: Keep the finger straight, and the thumb's going to go up to the finger and back like that. So you make a little L, and then we close the L.
Bob: Gotcha.
Brad: Open, close. And you can give it a little stretch here. Usually, it's going to be the thumb away from the fingers; that's probably the tight direction. And we can give it a gentle stretch there. So work it back and forth 10 times. If we need a little more after that, you have to get it warmed up. We're going to stretch it manually with the other hand. Not too aggressively, you don't want to get too sore. And then circles, clockwise.
Bob: Got it.
Brad: Counter-clockwise. Get that joint working well, and you can actually get in here and grab the bone right here. Grab that metacarpal and work it this way as well. And get in and work these muscles around the thumb and get that circulation going, all in that base part of the thumb, instead of starting out here on the end of the thumb.
Brad: And then we're going to work the MP joint and the IP joint in the thumb. Okay? The phalange joints, we call them. We're going to work those together. They only go one direction; they're a hinge joint, Bob.
Bob: Sure.
Brad: So it makes it much easier, less complicated to work with, and we're just going close or flex the thumb and then extend it and work it like that. Now I remember when I was younger, I could not flex.
Bob: I was going to say, you don't have much flexion the way it is. Look at mine compared to his.
Brad: Yeah. I could only go about 50% flexion. And then I could pop it past that and back and forth.
Bob: Really?
Brad: When I was just about five or six years old, I used to work at it; I'd go click, click, click. And I just kept doing it. I figured wear it through.
Bob: And it did. You were a therapist even back then, Brad.
Brad: Yeah. I remember doing it in church. I'd be getting bored, and I'd be clicking on my thumb. Going, "It's gotta get better sooner or later."
Bob: How unusual is that?
Brad: Sure enough, I said a prayer and then God took care of it.
Bob: Strange things.
Brad: But it is true that that was a real problem with both thumbs. I don't know what the deal is with that, but it works well now. So, you can put some pressure on here if you want to get further flexion, just like I was doing when I was a child. And then go back and you know, do 10 to 20 reps depending on how it feels.
Bob: Can I show a little bit of an advanced technique there?
Brad: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Bob: This is a Mulligan technique and a little, maybe a little bit hard to follow. But what you're going to do, if you have pain in that first joint, what you want to do is you're going to slide, you're going to put one finger at the top inside, and one finger at the bottom ouside of the thumb, and the top one's going to push away from the hand, and the bottom one's going to push toward the hand, and while I'm doing that, I push, and then I bend the thumb.
Brad: So he's trying to put a little pressure to make that joint go sideways.
Bob: Right.
Brad: Laterally. But you know, you're not going to break it or anything.
Bob: No, no.
Brad: Just some gentle pressure.
Bob: Just a little pressure. And it's amazing how often if that thumb joint, that first one, is painful, sometimes that takes it away. If that doesn't work, you might go the opposite way. So I put the thumb up here, and the top outside finger pushes toward the hand, and the bottom inside finger is pushing away from the hand. I hope you're following up on this. This is a little bit complicated, but it's amazing to me how this often works on any finger, really.
Brad: So he said Mulligan technique, from Brian Mulligan. Brian Mulligan was a physical therapist.
Bob: In New Zealand.
Brad: Yep. And is he still alive?
Bob: I believe so.
Brad: He's up there.
Bob: Yeah, he's up there. We saw him how many years ago?
Brad: Yeah, it was quite a while ago. And he looked old then.
Bob: But he was a spirit, wasn't he?
Brad: He was a real treat to work with. He was.
Bob: He was fun.
Brad: Whoa. Thank you for that little history lesson, Bob and Brad, in the past. Now we're in the present or back to the future, however you put it. Before we get into three exercises, I had this come to my attention from a person that I'm working with, some pain, and he happens to have a massage gun, and he has this little field goal head that goes on there, which I usually never use. And he said, "I really like that for massaging my thumb." And I thought, "What are you talking about?" And this is what he does, and he has found very good success with it. You're going to massage the muscle on each side of the thumb, and you go over the bone, right? We talked about previously in that history video, and you just work it in like this. Now, depending on the size of your thumb, it may or may not work, but I just wanted to show, because a lot of people do use massage guns now. And you can use it for that. Mike, you can also use it with the bullet head.
Mike: You're going to get thenar eminence or this muscular area in between the joint here. You're not gonig to go right on the bone with this type of bullet head. You can pick either side like that. If you don't have a massage gun, you could certainly massage in there yourself. But if you're having thumb pain on both sides, that gets pretty troublesome.
Brad: All right? And if you have a massage gun to use it for this particular purpose, it has to be a small or a mini massage gun, like this Q2 Massage Gun. Big ones will be too aggressive. Now let's get into the exercises. Now, after you've got things loosened up, as we just showed you, and you've got the thumb moving with less pain, what we need to do is strengthen it. So, like at the beginning, I'm trying to open the door, and all of a sudden, you're putting a lot of force into it. You have a little dislocation, which really hurts the arthritis in there. If you strengthen it after the range of motion exercises, much less potential to have that pain episode as I had. So, talk about the first one, Mike.
Mike: The first one you're going to want to do, we just call it opposition in the therapy world. But we're just going to touch the thumb to the pinky because it's furthest away. This is going to work on your thumb range of motion without any resistance.
Brad: That's right. Now this is my thumb that literally does hurt when I do things like that, and I can feel it right now. It's working that muscle. The right hand, no problem at all. The left hand definitely needs strengthening. Now we're going to work the opposite muscle group, and that's where the thumb goes back this way. Mike, can you talk about that?
Mike: So in order to do this, you place your hand on the table or countertop, keep your palm in contact with the mat, and try to lift your thumb up as far as you comfortably can. Don't cheat and rotate your hand up. It's just working that little range of motion going the opposite direction.
Brad: That's right. Again, it's not a lot of range of motion. But you will feel the muscle fatigue after 10 to 15 of these. And let's go to the next stage, a little more strengthening with some resistance.
Mike: So you can use some sort of ball. It's going to have to be soft and squishy. A tennis ball would probably be too aggressive. Whatever you have lying around could work. So you're going to place it in the palm of your hand, and you're going to take your thumb, and you're just going to push your thumb into your palm like this. You can do 10 repetitions, hold it there for a few seconds, and squeeze down. Brad's got a little bit squishier ball; it's a little easier. So, depending upon your pain, pick what feels most comfortable for you.
Brad: Yeah, these really work well, and they feel fun. They're just kind of fun to work with, in my opinion. Then we want to work the opposite range of motion. You can simply take a rubber band, as I have here. I'm going to hold it on my fingers, and we're just going to have a thumb motion, pulling out like this. And you'll definitely feel that you can see the tendons right here, the muscles that are doing the work. And again, between 10 and 20 of those. And again, you should have no sharp pain with this. If it is, your thumb's not ready for it. You need to rest a little bit.
Brad: And the ultimate of the strengthening exercises.
Mike: Number three is incorporating the whole hand. So again, have a ball, and you're going to essentially make a fist and squeeze the ball, closing your thumb as well as the rest of your fingers. You could do 10 repetitions of all of these. This would be the maximum progression of these exercises. Once that feels easy, you can work on extending either with a normal rubber band.
Brad: Here, try it with the soft squishy ball ones.
Mike: Well, this isn't very aggressive. There's just guts floating out from inside.
Brad: But for some people, that's going to be very appropriate.
Mike: Yes.
Brad: So yeah, look, those are, you can get them pretty cheap, typically too.
Mike: Now again, we want to focus on extension or opening the hand. So if you have a rubber band, you can use that. But as you see, as you go up, a rubber band normally kind of comes down like that. Brad has an actual tool.
Brad: It works okay if you don't open up too wide.
Mike: Yeah.
Brad: There you go.
Mike: Like this. If I open up all the way, then it goes down.
Brad: Yeah, and you can purchase these that are made specifically for that, and that works very well.
Mike: Just make sure you get one with low resistance or options. You don't want to go to the hardest one right away.
Brad: This one, the black color usually has more resistance, and it is. That's quite a bit. I'd have to work quite a bit with this. I'm already getting tired. Alright. Alright, so good luck with getting your thumb moving with less pain, strengthening it so you can function better.
Mike: If you want to check out more videos on trigger finger or trigger thumb, check out our video "Trigger Finger & Trigger Thumb; Everything You Need to Know to Fix."
Brad: There you go. Have fun and enjoy the day.
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