You probably use your wrists a lot more than you think. Pretty much anytime you use your hands for anything, you’re also using your wrists. You obviously use them for typing and using computers. You need them to eat with silverware and picking up your drink. It’s impossible to drive a car without them, or even use your smartphone and other devices. Even things you might not even think about, be it opening your mailbox or pressing buttons on an elevator all happen because of your wrists. If you’re at all active in sports or fitness activities, you might need your wrists to catch balls, shoot free throws, or support yourself in certain Yoga poses.

Over time, though, your wrists can get worn down. This can lead to conditions like arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome, and even tendonitis of the elbow. Some of these conditions aren’t necessarily directly wrist injuries, but given how the wrists conjoin the hands and fingers with the elbow joint, anything that impacts any part of your lower arm will also affect your wrists. Likewise, anything that influences your wrists negatively will also have a bad impact on your hands and elbows. This is why it’s a good idea to have wrist strengtheners you can use.

You might already be a weekend warrior or fitness fiend that walks, jogs, or cycles for lower body exercise and strength that builds up your body from your toes and ankles up through your knees and into your hips, abs, and core. If you do things like swimming, push-ups, or weight-lifting, you might also work out your upper body and arms. While some of these exercises can help out your wrists to some degree, it is wrist strengtheners specifically that help these joints in particular.

You can get one and alternate arms while exercising with it, or you can get a pair of them to use simultaneously in order to save time or just work out longer. The benefits of doing this are numerous, as you’ll be able to type without pain for many more years, work on those free throws more often, or just spend more time holding video game controllers late into the evening.

Many who are in their golden years don’t have the wrists they used to, which impacts their ability to do things like play catch with grandkids, much less pick them up or go golfing. Still, there are obviously ways to counteract this at any age.