Wrist Pain

Wrist pain tends to arrive quietly, from repetition rather than injury, and it’s easy to work around until it isn’t. Most of it responds well once the source is identified, and the source is often further up the arm than the place that hurts.

The wrist is a dense arrangement of eight small bones, the two forearm bones above them, and a bundle of tendons and nerves passing through on their way to the hand. Almost none of the muscles that move your fingers are in your hand; they’re in your forearm, pulling on long tendons that cross the wrist. That’s why forearm tightness and wrist pain so often travel together.

What causes wrist pain

Repetitive loading is the most common cause by a distance. Keyboard and mouse work, trades, lifting a child, gym work and racquet sports all load the wrist tendons in sustained or repeated positions, and the tendons become irritated where they cross the joint.

Tendon irritation on the thumb side of the wrist is a recognisable pattern, typically sore when gripping, lifting with the thumb out, or wringing a cloth. Nerve irritation shows up as tingling, numbness or night-time symptoms in specific fingers, and can be coming from the wrist, the elbow or the neck.

Joint pain follows a fall onto an outstretched hand, an old injury, or arthritic change, and tends to be more localised and more clearly linked to specific movements.

Forearm and elbow tightness frequently drives wrist symptoms, which is why tennis elbow and golfer’s elbow sit in the same family of problems.

When to see a physiotherapist

Wrist pain that’s persisted beyond a couple of weeks, or that’s starting to affect grip, is worth assessing. Hand and wrist problems have a habit of being worked around until the compensation creates a second problem in the elbow or shoulder, and they’re considerably easier to settle before that.

Some wrist injuries need urgent medical assessment: an obvious deformity after a fall, an inability to move the wrist at all, or rapidly increasing swelling with redness and fever. If you contact the clinic with any of these, you’ll be told the same thing and helped to get seen. A fall onto an outstretched hand with ongoing pain over the thumb-side bones also warrants prompt imaging to rule out a fracture.

Physiotherapy treatment for wrist pain

Andrew assesses the wrist’s own movement, the forearm muscles and tendons driving it, grip strength, and whether a nerve is involved, before treating anything. Treatment usually combines:

• Manual therapy to restore movement in the wrist and forearm where it’s stiff, and soft tissue work through the forearm muscles.
• Dry needling for persistently tight forearm muscles that keep reloading the tendons.
• Exercise rehabilitation, graded loading for the tendons and grip work, which is what changes a tendon’s tolerance.
• Set-up and technique advice for the specific task causing it, whether that’s a keyboard, a tool or a lift.

What to expect

Andrew will explain which structure is irritated, what’s loading it, and what’s likely to change first. Tendon-related wrist pain typically improves over weeks with consistent loading rather than over days, and he’ll set out that timeline so you know what progress should look like.