How to Fix Carpal Tunnel Syndrome: Get Results & Avoid Surgery [Video]

Can Posture Therapy Help Fix Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Hand Pain from Typing? Video Summary

Hand and wrist pain, especially from typing, can be debilitating and is often diagnosed as carpal tunnel syndrome. But what if the root cause of this pain isn’t just in your wrists? In this video, our team explores how posture alignment therapy can address the underlying issues that contribute to carpal tunnel symptoms by looking beyond the wrist to your entire body alignment.

Carpal tunnel syndrome often stems from extended periods in a forward-flexed position—like hunching over a computer or mobile device. This position can create nerve compression in the wrists and forearms, but the underlying tension often starts higher up in the body. When your shoulders round forward, or if your spine is not properly aligned, it disrupts the natural positioning of your arms, elbows, and wrists, causing strain in the lower arm and hand. 

The team also discusses how specific life stages, like pregnancy, can exacerbate these symptoms. As your posture adapts to body changes, your shoulders may round forward, compressing nerves and leading to elbow and wrist tension. This can result in carpal tunnel symptoms, even without increased computer use.

To help determine if posture is a factor, the team shares simple self-assessments like standing against a wall to check shoulder alignment or testing wrist flexibility with specific stretches. For instance, a forearm stretch against a wall can help reveal hidden tension in the arm, shoulder, and neck that may be impacting your wrist health. By noticing if one shoulder is more forward, or if your elbows are more bent, you can start to see how misalignment in the upper body contributes to wrist and hand pain.

Our posture alignment therapists emphasize the importance of working through the entire kinetic chain—spine, shoulders, elbows, and wrists—to release the compression that might be triggering nerve pain in your hands. When you realign your posture and address the whole body’s involvement, you can reduce tension throughout the kinetic chain and experience relief without invasive treatments.

If you’re experiencing carpal tunnel or hand pain from typing, consider posture alignment therapy as a holistic approach to relieve your discomfort and improve overall body mechanics. Our team can help you understand and address these misalignments, guiding you toward long-term relief and a healthier work routine.

Can Posture Alignment Therapy Help Fix Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Hand Pain from Typing? Video Transcript

Hey, guys. Thank you for sending in your questions. We picked one this week. Somebody said, "Can posture alignment therapy help with carpal tunnel syndrome or hand pain from typing?”

Yeah. Absolutely. And I think, it's something that we see in everybody that's on not just computers, but also mobile devices. So we've got this flexed position, and, of course, that can affect how the nerve conduction is going through the wrist and through the hand. And mostly it's related to typing, though, on a computer. Hopefully, you've got a good ergonomic setup where you're thinking about the angle, the 90 degree angle at your elbow and shoulder position, being able to be relaxed versus being on that coffee table or slumped over in your bed or on the couch or something like that.

Hopefully, those things are givens. We do have an ergonomic assessment that you can take a look at. We'll put that in the description below, so you can self-assess your workstation as well and your posture going in. But, yeah, it's something that we definitely see a lot. 

Yeah. And, one time of life that it’s really common to get carpal tunnel syndrome is actually during pregnancy. And you're not really typing more when you're pregnant, but your whole alignment, your whole body shape is kind of changing. And what happens is a lot of women go a little bit more anterior, and then they feel heavy, and they let their shoulders round forward, And then you start to compress nerves up here, but also the second that you round forward here, your elbow bends. And when your elbow bends, you start turning on the pronators and supinators, and then your wrist gets affected. And so just by having your shoulders back and down and your arms straight, a lot of that sort of nerve compression and tension can go away.

So there are a few tests that you can do to see if you're more rolled forward on one side or if one elbow is more bent. And I don't know. Maybe Kim, do you wanna pop up and go against your wall and maybe just put it through the wall here for that. 

Yeah. I'm gonna just take off my two jackets because it's cold in California. California cold. It's 42 degrees, I'm sorry. No. It's probably, like, 60 right now.

For me, one of the easiest things to see if my arms are in a good position with my shoulders is just standing up against the wall. So if I have my heels, my buttocks, my upper back against the wall – take the clip out of my hair so it doesn't push my head forward – is how far are my arms away from the wall? So you might not be able to see my feet, but that's my heels, my buttocks, and my back against the wall. Are my arms in front or are they able to lay flat? Let me actually bring it a little bit more to the side here.

And not just shoulders. You can see my elbows are a little bit bent. I do have a little bit of shoulders in front. So me completely relaxed, I'm here.

I can force it back without having much… I don't have any tension at all if I pull my arms back. But for some people, because of the posture of where they stand or where their muscles are pulling in front, I see a lot of clients where they're standing, and it's here. And even if they pull their shoulders back, then it looks like this. And if you notice my head now is a little bit in front. 

Yeah. And that's a really good point. If you do go against the wall and initially your shoulders are rolling off and you force them back, then does your head jut forward? Does your lower back sway forward? Because just forcing something into the right position is not a good fix. And now at that angle, we couldn't really see Kim's other arm.

I did notice that that left elbow was bent. So, if she was in front of me, I'd be really curious to see if the right was bent as much or more, and then we have to kinda look and see what is the flexibility of maybe your forearm muscles, maybe is your biceps too tight and you have to do tricep work or lengthen it out. There's a really nice exercise that kinda opens up the forearm. It also opens up your chest and pec. Again, Kim, you're kind of in a better spot.

Yeah. Yeah. 

I can show it a little bit. You would stand sideways to a wall, and you want to really spread your fingers so your middle finger is facing the ceiling. You want your feet even. You don't want to be leaning one way or the other, just sort of nice and relaxed and even. You want to relax your shoulders back and down, maybe even have a little engagement in between your shoulder blades, and then you're twisting your elbow back and forth. 

What you don't want to do is you don't want to have it all be moving the shoulder. Your shoulder should stay relatively still and your elbow should move. Now depending on whether you have carpal tunnel, whether you have a super tight forearm, everybody will feel that in a different spot.

Some people can't even get their hand flat if they have a super tight forearm and, you might have to do a forearm stretch. But that one little exercise, just putting your hand on a wall and kind of making it closed chain, locking that hand in place, and moving your arm is a great… it's a great test to see how mobile you are, but it's also a great stretch and release to see, oh, you know, do I feel it in my forearm? 

I don't have particularly tight forearms. I tend to feel it more around my bicep. But a lot of people that come in, especially if you have carpal tunnel or just wrist issues, you're gonna feel it in your thumb or you're gonna feel it in your fingers because you're just gonna be so so tight there. And so that's just one of those areas where we need to change the length tension. 

And again, kind of going on with what part of your body are you feeling, like, along that arm? It's another test I can demonstrate because I have this easy wall here, is a forearm stretch. And, again, same like Carrie Ann said, it's a great stretch as well as a test to see where are you. I'm gonna be standing next to the wall.

My arms are down by my side. I'm gonna try to have a 90 degree angle at my wrist and at my elbows. Just coming up to the wall, feet hip width apart, and just standing here. Am I able to get in this position, or do I feel my hands, can they flatten? Again, without me leaning forward, arms just relax by the side.

And I'll have a lot of clients tell me, oh, when I'm doing this, they say, I feel things happening in my whole body. Not just a stretch, only here in the forearms, but they'll say they feel their shoulders kind of relax and pull back. Or they'll tell me that they feel their neck release even just by getting in this position and holding it. 

And it gets easier as you do it over time. Of course, the first time you do it, it's just like, oh my gosh. I've never stretched my hand in that position. But as you do it, it should get easier as you do it each day. 

Yeah. And, very few people that we assign that exercise can do that and look like that. So if you're trying this at home and Kim had just her hands chilling against the wall, if you have a big gap, that's okay.

It'll change. It's a stretch. It's something that your body… you need to adjust to get into it. It, and that's why you would do that. If it were really easy for you, we wouldn't give it to you because you don't need it.

Yeah. In both those exercises, I think they point out not just the tension that's in the forearm, wrist, and across the elbow, but then moving up to the shoulder, moving into the thoracic spine. So those are the things you wanna pay attention to also. And then, like Carrie Ann's point with the pregnancy is it extends down to the pelvic position, and you don't have to be pregnant for that to happen. So we see a lot of people who are, anterior pelvic tilt or stuck in their pelvis, then that sort of lordotic, kyphotic posture where the upper back is rounding and stuck, and that's gonna bring the shoulders forward. And then that's gonna set us up where, yeah, those muscles never get to relax, and so there's always that tension. 

The other thing I would just add real quick is that there's a couple of tests you can do. So there's one is where you just tap on the nerve, and then you can get a sense of this just past your wrist, sort of towards the palm. And then do you get, sort of a tingling or a nervous sensation into the thumb in the first couple of fingers there? 

And then the other one is where you stand and you bring your hands together, the backs of your hands together, and hold that there for 30 to 60 seconds. And then do you get, again, that same sort of numbness and tingling? And then what I would say is try those two exercises that you were just shown. Try those standing at the wall as a test, but then try the chest openers that Carrie Ann showed, and then try the forearm stretch that Kim showed, and then come back to it. Come back to those tests and get a sense of did that change, did that adjust the sensation? 

Those are quick ways to say, like, hey, if the exercise got better or changed something, and then I don't have that positive test that maybe this is a postural problem, and I should I should look at more than just the wrist. Because we've seen lots of clients who get surgeries and go to the extreme, but if there's a way to sort of non-invasively take care of that, then why wouldn't you go there first? 

I mean, yeah, the only thing I feel like everything that I would have said has already been addressed, but I do like the idea of using everything that we just talked about as both a stretch and also a test just because I feel like it's helpful for clients because they can start to, again, just think about all of those different areas that they're feeling, instead of just hyperfixating on the tingling or the issue in the wrist and hand area. Think about it again, well, are you feeling it in the shoulder? Are you feeling it in the pelvis?

So all things that we already kind of touched on, but that I feel like is a big eye opener for a lot of my clients at least is when they start to actually feel these different areas of their body and how they all connect.

Yeah. That's a good point. And, when we do look at the body holistically and it's easy just to go segmentally, which is say, okay, the shoulder and the upper back complex and that.

And, you know, as Kim was standing with her back to the wall, I'm like, oh, yeah, she mentioned the head position because the head position is gonna be affected by what's going on there. But that does go down to.. if the shoulder… let's say your shoulder is compensating for your hip, for a dysfunctional hip problem. So this is where, if you have a problem somewhere else in your body or an ankle or a knee or something else that's just not working right, then your shoulder can actually compensate, take over for that. And now it's being sort of hijacked as a way to create movement or to stabilize for something else.

And then it's like, well, we've got to unlock that other piece in order to get to the shoulder so that then we can get the wrist to release. So there are these sort of multistep, not just one layer, but we've got to peel the layers of the onion. 

So, Miranda, I think I hear that in what you're saying because you see a lot of the new clients that are coming in and it's trying to help them to understand there are these layers of the onion and so we can release these. But then tying the pieces together enough so that it's like, well, why are you working on my ankle? Or why are you working on my hip when I'm talking about my wrist?

What does it have to do with it? Because nobody has told them that before.