Friendly Swede Egg Shaped Hand Exercise Rehabilitation Balls Review

Friendly Swede Egg Shaped Hand Exercise Rehabilitation Balls Review

Buy it at Amazon: Friendly Swede Egg Shaped Hand Exercise Rehabilitation Balls [Affiliate Link]

Takeaway: Exercise and strengthen your hands; useful for injury recoveries!!

I dislocated and tore the muscle in my thumb along my palm back in January of 2015. While it took about a month or two to regain full use of my hand, ever since there's been some lingering tightness and occasional sharp pain when grasping objects or applying pressure with my fingers. Although stretching helps, to strengthen the muscles in my hand over time I needed to provide some resistance, which is where these exercise balls come in.

The egg shape of these is more ergonomic than a round ball and small enough to fit into the palm of my hand. They are about the size of medium or large eggs from the supermarket and have an "orange peel" textured feel. They are made of a thermoplastic rubber but don't have a strong rubbery odor. There are three resistances: soft (yellow), medium (red) and firm (blue). They have a dry feel to them with a fair amount of friction, though the soft one has a slight tackiness to it. It's not sticky per se, but pet hair and dust will definitely adhere to it. However, these are washable with plain water.

The soft one is quite squishy but does offer some resistance, like squeezing your typical stress ball. The medium is a bit firmer and feels like trying to squeeze a lemon. And the firm is more like trying to squeeze a tennis ball. With all of these, the harder you squeeze the more resistance you'll encounter.

Do they work? I've been using these for about a week, starting with the soft one. I can already feel the tightness in my hand is a bit less than before, so next I'll be using the medium one. My hand was probably 90% better already when I started using these, it just had a little weirdness to them when exerting force. I hope this little bit of exercise, about 5-15 minutes a day, will get me back to 100% soon. It's easy because I can just pick one of these up off my desk and go for 5 minutes without interrupting my day. As with all exercise and therapy equipment, individual results may vary, but any kind of resistance training in cases of injury will help rebuild muscle tone and strength.

There's plenty of hand strengthening tools out there and most of them probably work with varying results, so it comes down to preference and what feels right for you. I like these because the egg shape is form fitting for my hands, and I can choose the resistance I'm comfortable with. A tennis ball, for example, would be too big and too hard for me to have used earlier on in my injury.

Buy it at Amazon: Friendly Swede Egg Shaped Hand Exercise Rehabilitation Balls [Affiliate Link]