Novice Exercise
Begin with two small Baoding balls. Practice rotating the balls clockwise around your inner palm. Increase the size of the balls once you are used to rotating the small ones about your palms without clanking them together. When you are good at rotating them clockwise, change to a counterclockwise rotation. Rotating the balls with your fingers flexes the muscles in the forearms, fingers and hands, increasing the strength of those muscles. You can also practice pinching a ball between the thumb, ring and pointer fingers, and then tossing it into the palm of the other hand.
Placement Exercises
Placement exercises involve placing and rotating the balls over pressure points on the body to relieve tension, pain and stimulate the lymph nodes. For example, placement of the balls under the arch of the foot can stimulate pressure points there and aid in treating pain related to plantar fasciitis. To relieve neck pain, a Baoding ball can be rolled over the point on the back of the neck where it meets the skull. The massaging motion involved in these placement exercises relaxes the muscles and tendons. Small Baoding balls can also be placed between the fingers to strengthen and massage them.
Multiple Ball Exercises
Advanced exercises improve the dexterity of your fingers and hands and require more skill because you add additional balls. Work up to rotating as many Baoding balls as you can in each hand, both clockwise and counterclockwise. More challenging is combining the use of both hands to rotate multiple balls. Like any other Baoding ball exercise, this one requires starting with a small number of balls and working up to as many as you can hold in both hands.
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