Massage Gun for Carpal Tunnel Relief and Wrist Pain
- Hi folks, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- Together we are the mostfamous physical therapists on the internet.
- In our opinion, Bob, of course.
- Brad, we've got our new toy here and today we're gonna show you how to use a massage gun for carpal tunnel syndrome.
You usually don't think of doing massage with carpal tunnel.
- Right.
- We're gonna show you some reasons why you might wanna do it.
So first off I wanna show you, these are all the muscles of the forearm,
anterior forearm, the front here. And you may never have heard of this,
but there's a thing called double crush syndrome.
And this was, I'll talk about the two authors of this later, but they speculate that the nerve, the median nerve, which is the one that gives you carpal tunnel symptoms, actually gets a little sensitized by maybe being pinched up in the neck.
- Sure.
- Or it can get a little pinched in the forearm.
- Sure.
- Especially from the pronator teres.
Here's the pronator teres, but this is actually the muscle right here.
- It's right in here.
So the idea of the double crush means it's getting pinched in two locations.
Here, and or here, I guess-
- That would be a triple.
- Yeah. Right.
But you know, if it was here or here-
- Right.
- Whatever, it's two locations.
- It's double. Right.
And this isn't that common, but my theory is also it's just going to be good to massage all the muscles of the forearm, because any one of them maybe
could have put a little pressure on the median nerve.
- Right. 'Cause all the tendons from those muscles go right through the carpal tunnel.
- Yeah, can you see that right here?
So if you picture these muscles as they continue on down, they enter, here's the flexor retinaculum.
- [Brad] Yup.
- [Bob] And that forms the tunnel
- [Brad] Yup.
- [Bob] And look at all the
tendons that go through it.
I did a cross section here.
- [Brad] Love it.
- [Bob] Yeah. Look at all the tendons.
There's nine tendons there.
This one, I don't think is
in the tunnel, but these nine
are in their flexor digitorum
superficialis profundus.
- [Brad] Yeah.
- [Bob] So, but anyway,
there's the nerve right there.
We think by massaging all the muscles,
you maybe put a little less
pressure on the tendons.
- Right, so those tendons
aren't as taut and tight
so that it relaxes things.
- And we're going to show
you also, I think Brad,
that, you know, if you hit
the muscles up in the hand,
you know in case the nerves
are getting a little sensitive in there.
- Sure.
- You might be able to take
some pressure off of there.
- It's one of those things, you know,
if you have a massage
gun it really works well,
and it doesn't take that much time.
And it typically feels good.
- Right. And if it makes things
worse, you wouldn't do it,
but generally it's going
to make things better.
So, all right. We'll move on to that.
All right, so as we
already demonstrated to you
we're going to try to massage the muscles
in the front of the forearm.
Upton and McComas, by
the way, were the ones
that came up with the research
on double crush syndrome.
And they feel like it's fairly prevalent.
They felt like in 75% of the cases-
- Oh really?
- It was, yeah, it was present.
So anyway, we're going to go ahead
and while this is probably
a little bit too aggressive
for that one, I'll take this one
- Yeah, that's the (laughs)
- That's the mother of all massage guns.
- Yeah. This size or this
size would work good.
- Yep. And I'm going to use the ball
- Yep.
- Because it's a nice span,
it's not too aggressive.
- Yep.
- And I can work on, and I mean
it hit that pronator teres,
which comes off the inside elbow here.
- So palm is up when you're doing this.
- Yup. And let things relax.
- Just be careful you don't get on that,
the bone down here where
the muscles connect.
Cause it'll be painful, so
stay on the muscle belly-
- If you're worried
about that, you could use
the attachment, the air attachment.
Do we have one of those here?
Yeah, here. This right here.
I can put it in this one.
- So they're full of air,
and they're nice, and soft and spongy.
It's a really good one around bony areas,
or if you're just getting started and
you don't want to get too aggressive.
- Exactly. And these all
have like five speeds,
so you want to start on the lowest speed,
determine your tolerance.
I mean, you might, the next
day, go up a little higher,
but the first day, take it
a little easy the first day
because you want to make
sure that you're not
waking up in the middle
of night swearing at
Bob and Brad for-
- Yeah, we have a hard time sleeping
when those vibes come through the airways.
The internet.
- So anyway, we're
hitting the, we're hitting
all those muscles, and we also felt like,
and again, this is a good one for the air,
is to hit the, I like to hit
the meaty pad thenar eminence
right below the thumb.
- Yep.
- And I like to hit the other side too,
even though that's not the median nerve.
But I just like to hit
the whole hand here.
- Yeah. One thing you don't wanna do is
get over the median nerve where
it crosses the carpal tunnel
because that's going to beat
it up and we don't want that.
It's pretty superficial.
It's close to the skin at that point.
I've actually used this
pointer one on the smaller gun,
but I am very particular about staying-
- You're going sideways a
little bit too, aren't you?
- Yeah, and I'll get in
there into that muscle
and work it this way, just
not on the carpal tunnel.
And then over here-
- The air-filled one really
works well with this, Brad.
- You like that?
- Well, feel that.
- Yeah, it's definitely
not nearly as aggressive,
it's spread out, so that's
a great one to start with.
I would not start with this one
until you get a feel
for where it feels good
and where it works.
- Yeah, the thing that's
nice about this too,
with the massage gun, in my mind, is that
quite often if you have
carpal tunnel in one hand,
you might also develop it in the other.
- Sure.
- So if you start massaging
too much with the bare hand-
- You might actually start it manually.
Yeah. Which there's nothing wrong with,
but you do get tired pretty quick,
and like you said, you could end up
with problems on both sides.
- Now, Brad and I both agreed that,
I don't think I'd buy a massage gun
just for carpal tunnel syndrome.
- No.
- But if you're having, you know,
if you're getting up in the
little bit years, like we are,
things are going to crop up, quite often
and a massage gun, you can
use it over the entire body.
- Right, yeah. If you're an
active person, boy you're...
Well, everyone we know that has them,
including a ton of comments coming back,
people purchasing these
things are using them
and happy with them.
- Yeah. This video, by the way, is a part
of a series of videos on massage.
If you go to BobAndBrad.com,
go to the program section,
look for the program on massage.
We also have one on sciatica and hip pain,
although we don't have that up yet.
- It's not up yet. It's there, but it says
right on there, it's coming soon.
- Tense shoulder.
- Yep.
- So anyway, go in there,
we have about, I don't
know, 30 or 40 videos,
check out which ones pertain to you.
- Right.
- And you can watch that video,
and then what else, Brad?
- Well, afterwards, you can
just click on the PDF printout
and you're going to get
a preview or a review
of the whole video, one or
two pages long. Print it out.
Bob did a heck of a job with them.
He should be an English
major soon with this.
- That's right.
- And print it off, there's
no cost to you whatsoever.
Not even an email.
It's just a strictly a
gift for everyone out there
to help themselves out.
- So when you're swearing at us,
remember we gave this to you for free.
All right, thanks for watching.
(upbeat guitar music)