Super Easy Yet Effective Hand Strengthening Activities for your Little One

Grip strengthening exercise is not only applicable for adults; it is also applicable for children too.

Grip strengthening exercise can be a habit that must inculcate from childhood. Children’s hands are delicate and soft, so as a parent, we don’t want to put pressure, but a few pressures in the form of exercise can be beneficial for your little one. Grip strengthening exercises for children are done in such a way that they can endure their muscles without hurting their hands. These increase their holding abilities and boost confidence. Your child can develop enough core strength with strong independence through good holding ability. Thus, we generally advise parents to map a few exercises to improve their small forearm muscles along with an improved range of motion.

Experts said that few kids have very weak grip strength just because of weak forearm muscles along with fragile fingers. Few children suffer from neuromuscular anomalies or congenital complications. There is just because of muscle weakness and not having adequate finger-thumb coordination. In this situation, children can not hold an object in the right way due to a lack of coordination between the central nervous system (CNS) and Forearm muscles. They have very minimum hand strength.

Children have the less gripping ability for several reasons, but they’re often ignored. If you ignore this weakness, it can affect your child for life-long. Thus, doctors suggest some gross-motor activities and gripping exercises improve forearm muscle strength and finger tendons. In this article, we will talk about simple yet super effective activities that really boost your kids’ muscle strength and increase their grasping ability

Obviously they don’t have to do a workout like adults. These exercises will be more fun than exerting pressure.

For example, wet sponge squeezing, Paper clumping, scissor cutting, playing with putty and synthetic dough, and performing some gross-motor activities are just like games. Your children will love to do that with much fun. All these fun activities boost their satisfactory motor capacity. If you observe your children have a poor grip with low hand strength, along with incorrect fine motor development, please talk with paediatric neuro professional. 

Here we’ll discuss a list of games and activities that will help your child develop strong grip strength.

Playing with the Spray bottle.

Children love to play with a spray bottle filled with colourful water. We used to play with them in our childhood. Now you may understand how engaging the game will be right. Yes, children will do it without feeling that they are doing some grip strengthening activities and unknowingly develop good forearm muscles.

Now people are reluctant to go outside and play with their friends; instead, they love to engage with laptops and mobiles, which gradually causes tendon inactiveness and finger fatigue. Thus it would help if you encouraged them to play outside, and playing with a colourful spray bottle could be a great option indeed.

However, don’t forget to use a good quality plastic spray bottle for hygiene and safety; and wash them thoroughly before and after every use.

Paper Crumpling

Your children may love to crumple up scrap paper. Let them do that.

It is a really unique way to satisfy their soul and mind. These kinds of activities help them to become more creative in life. It both strengthens the brain and forearm muscles. So don’t demotivate them; instead, encourage them to do this, and help them to make small and tight paper dough within a very limited time. Why we talk about limited time? Just because they need to put enough pressure to make a tight paper dough at minimum time. If your child fails to do that, it means he/ she hasn’t enough grip strength. Here you have to expand the time frame and encourage them to make paper dough. They gradually build grip strength.

Squeezing sponges

Do you recall your child playing with wipes at any time? If he has, this is the perfect opportunity to open the door. You can give your child a wipe, which could be a wet wipe for the bathroom or a wipe for painting. Ask them to crush the entire water out of it. You can choose the size of the wipes that best suits your child’s hand size and shape. This is a great hand grasp strengthening exercise that should be done in their bathtub. To maintain great cleanliness and wellbeing, wash the wipe and disinfect it after each use.

Scissor Cutting

If your child can use scissors correctly and is mature enough, you should allow them to practice paper cutting with a pair. Scissor cutting can be done with only tripod fingers. However, the entire forearm will be able to participate in this art-and-craft activity. Ask your children to use their entire hand and each finger, and thumb in their paper cutting session to leverage optimum benefits.

These activities will help your child strengthen their finger joints and forearm muscles. You can then give your child a hand gripper so they can move on to the next level.