The primary factor that makes your hands thicker is the growth of your hand muscles. While bone growth typically ceases during adolescence for women and a few years later for men, the size of hand muscles can be significantly increased through exercise.
How Exercise Impacts Hand Thickness
Exercises focused on hand strength and flexibility play a crucial role in increasing the size of hand muscles. These exercises cause muscle hypertrophy, meaning that the muscle fibers themselves grow larger.
- Strength Training: Activities like weight lifting, gripping exercises, and using hand strengtheners cause microtears in the muscle fibers, which then repair and grow back stronger and thicker.
- Flexibility Exercises: Exercises like finger stretching, hand extensions, and range-of-motion exercises improve overall muscle function and can contribute to a larger appearance.
- Consistent Training: Regular exercise is key to achieving noticeable muscle growth. Sporadic or infrequent exercises will have a minimal impact.
Factors That Don't Primarily Affect Hand Thickness
It is also important to note what does not significantly impact hand thickness:
- Bone Growth: While the underlying bone structure of the hand does contribute to its size, bone growth largely stops after adolescence. Therefore, bone development is not a major factor in adults when considering increased hand thickness.
- Fat Accumulation: While some fat accumulation can occur in hands, it does not typically contribute significantly to hand thickness compared to muscle growth. It should also be noted that exercise will likely reduce fat in the area instead of increasing it.
Examples of Hand Exercises
Here are a few examples of exercises that could lead to increased hand thickness:
- Grip Strengthening: Use a hand grip strengthener or squeeze a stress ball to build finger and hand muscle strength.
- Finger Stretches: Extend fingers as far as possible and hold for several seconds, repeating multiple times.
- Wrist Curls: Using light weights, curl the wrist to work forearm and hand muscles.
- Push-ups Traditional push-ups and push-ups with varying hand positions can significantly engage and strengthen the hand muscles.
Summary
In essence, exercise focused on hand strength and flexibility is the main reason your hands can become thicker. This happens through the growth of muscle mass.
