Assistive equipments and occupational exercises for hands to improve daily life activities

Upper Body Exercises: Upper Body exercises help you to use adaptive devices better and also you can engage in your daily activities with less effort and pain.  Daily Activities like washing plates, putting them back on to the rack, and pulling out clothes from the closets. Taking baths, combing hair, drying hair all of these activities one needs to strengthen their upper body. 

Overhead press: This exercise helps to build the muscles helping the patient to strengthen their upper core and arms which can help them in their daily activities like picking up and replacing overhead items in a cabinet, putting clothes to dry and many of those daily chores.  

Other exercises that could be helpful are overhead Elbow Extension, Bicep Curls and Arm Raises. 

Hand exercises: Hand exercises are very important as well, as one needs to use our fingers and arm from holding our brush to spoon a cup of water or open and close the taps, everything, we need to do on a daily basis demands strength of hands and fingers which is called fine motor grasp.  To improve and maintain this Fine Motor Grasp Ability one can practice few exercises with homely available exercising tools like;

• Pick and drop exercise: where one can use buttons, bits of straw, cloth clips to exercise their fingers and entire arms.  
• Finger flexion: Using clay molds, for power grips and finger fluxion. 
• Table roll: Rolling the clay mold on a table to get it into a ball shape. 
• Exercise Balls: These Balls can be used for improving power grips. 

• Wrist weights: These are used for Arm Rolls to improve shoulder strength. 

Alternative devices, are also available such as,

• Build up Handles which are very useful for those with lower grasp ability. 
• Large key chain models can be used to attach to pull up zippers to help hold the zippers. 

The above-mentioned exercises and with the right tools or devices could help the patients recover faster and enjoy a normal life. 

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