Why Your Wrists Hurt During Planks (And How to Finally Fix It)
If your wrists ache every time you drop into a plank on the reformer, I need you to look at where your hands are.
I see this constantly in studios across the country: hands placed so the wrists sit right on the edge of the carriage with the fingers hanging off the side. It feels natural. It doesn't feel wrong. But it's loading your tiny wrist joint in a way it was never designed to handle.
The Problem with Edge Placement
When your wrists are perched on the side of the reformer carriage with your fingers dangling, all of the pressure loads into the heel of your hand. That concentration of force overloads the wrist joint and causes you to hang through your shoulders instead of engaging them. You end up gripping, bracing, and compensating rather than actually working.
"That's going to put all of the pressure on the heel of your hand, overload your tiny wrist joint, and have you hanging through your shoulders."
And just flipping your fingers from hanging to flat? That doesn't fix it either. You're still loading the same joint in the same place. The root problem isn't your finger position. It's where your hand is making contact with the surface.
What Sharing the Work Actually Looks Like
The fix is about distributing pressure evenly across your entire palm and fingers. When your hand has a full surface to work from, the load spreads across a wider area and shifts up the chain. Your middle back starts to engage. Your shoulders wake up. Your core deepens. The wrist pain? It disappears.
This is how a plank is supposed to feel. Not something you're white-knuckling through, but something you can actually settle into.
Cue to Remember
Think "share the work across your palms, even across your fingers - like a starfish suctioned to a rock." That distribution drives the effort through your shoulders, into your middle back, and deep into your core.
The Tool That Makes It Click
This is one of the key reasons I designed the WundaCore Blocks. They give your hands a stable, elevated surface that puts your wrists in a neutral position and allows your palm and fingers to share the load fully. The moment you use them, you stop fighting your wrist pain and start actually working.
Once I set up with the Blocks, I could stay there all day. The plank goes from something you endure to something that genuinely challenges your posterior chain and deep core in the best way.
The Bigger Picture
Wrist pain during Pilates is usually a setup problem, not a strength problem. Before you wrap your wrists, drop to your elbows or avoid the exercise, check how your hand is loaded. Small adjustments in how you make contact with the equipment change everything about how the movement travels through your body.
Your wrists are small joints doing a big job. Give them the support they need and let your larger muscles share the work they were built for.
That's the whole game.