Clapping hands is really good for you! According to several well established healing modalities (acupressure, acupuncture, reflexology, and various adaptations of the above), the hands and palms have numerous reflex points that, when stimulated, engage the body's healing response and prompt a gradual (sometimes near immediate) improvement in any type of ailment.
A different way to look at this is to consider that:
- We have receptors in the hands that are connected to sensory fields in the brain, as shown by the cortical homunculus model (our neurological “map” – see below.) Clapping activates these hands receptors (or more if you use your hands to clap on other body parts), which in turn activate a fair portion of the brain, which itself leads to the activation of various body systems and their associated healing response in ways that are experientially evident but that we still need to better understand.
- Clapping stimulates blood circulation, the lifeline of the human body, and this helps with literally everything.
K.C. Bhardwaj is a 76-year-old man from India who says that hands clapping cured his glaucoma:
“Over a decade back I was looking for a miracle cure to glaucoma. I had started lose vision in both eyes. I did not have the courage to undergo surgery. It was then I heard at a ‘satsang’ that clapping could cure diseases and that was why devotees clapped while reciting kirtans. I regained my vision in about a year just by clapping for about half an hour every morning.”
What research shows: Clap your hands for brain power
A researcher in Israel conducted the first study of hand-clapping songs, revealing a direct link between those activities and the development of important skills in children of all ages.
Dr. Idit Sulkin says “We found that children in the first, second and third grades who sing these songs demonstrate skills absent in children who don’t take part in similar activities. We also found that children who spontaneously perform hand-clapping songs in the yard during recess have neater handwriting, write better and make fewer spelling errors.”
[.]Science News
from research organizations
Hand-clapping songs improve motor and cognitive skills, research shows
- Date:
- May 3, 2010
- Source:
- American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
- Summary:
- A researcher in Israel conducted the first study of hand-clapping songs, revealing a direct link between those activities and the development of important skills in children and young adults, including university students.
FULL STORY
A researcher at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) conducted the first study of hand-clapping songs, revealing a direct link between those activities and the development of important skills in children and young adults, including university students.
"We found that children in the first, second and third grades who sing these songs demonstrate skills absent in children who don't take part in similar activities," explains Dr. Idit Sulkin a member of BGU's Music Science Lab in the Department of the Arts. "We also found that children who spontaneously perform hand-clapping songs in the yard during recess have neater handwriting, write better and make fewer spelling errors."
Dr. Warren Brodsky, the music psychologist who supervised her doctoral dissertation, said Sulkin's findings lead to the presumption that "children who don't participate in such games may be more at risk for developmental learning problems like dyslexia and dyscalculia. There's no doubt such activities train the brain and influence development in other areas. The children's teachers also believe that social integration is better for these children than those who don't take part in these songs."
As part of the study, Sulkin went to several elementary school classrooms and engaged the children in either a board of education sanctioned music appreciation program or hand-clapping songs training -- each lasting a period of 10 weeks.
"Within a very short period of time, the children who until then hadn't taken part in such activities caught up in their cognitive abilities to those who did," she said. But this finding only surfaced for the group of children undergoing hand-clapping songs training. The result led Sulkin to conclude that hand-clapping songs should be made an integral part of education for children aged six to 10, for the purpose of motor and cognitive training.
During the study, "Impact of Hand-clapping Songs on Cognitive and Motor Tasks," Dr. Sulkin interviewed school and kindergarten teachers, visited their classrooms and joined the children in singing. Her original goal, as part of her thesis, was to figure out why children are fascinated by singing and clapping up until the end of third grade, when these pastimes are abruptly abandoned and replaced with sports.
"This fact explains a developmental process the children are going through," Dr. Sulkin observes. "The hand-clapping songs appear naturally in children's lives around the age of seven, and disappear around the age of 10. In this narrow window, these activities serve as a developmental platform to enhance children's needs -- emotional, sociological, physiological and cognitive. It's a transition stage that leads them to the next phases of growing up."
Sulkin says that no in-depth, long-term study has been conducted on the effects that hand-clapping songs have on children's motor and cognitive skills. However, the relationship between music and intellectual development in children has been studied extensively, prompting countless parents to obtain a "Baby Mozart" CD for their children.
This study also demonstrates that listening to 10 minutes of Mozart music (.i.e., the 'Mozart Effect') does not improve spatial task performance more than 10 minutes hand clapping songs training or 10 minutes exposure to silence.
Sulkin also found that hand-clapping song activity has a positive effect on adults: University students who filled out her questionnaires reported that after taking up such games, they became more focused and less tense. "These techniques are associated with childhood, and many adults treat them as a joke," she said. "But once they start clapping, they report feeling more alert and in a better mood."
Sulkin grew up in a musical home. Her father, Dr. Adi Sulkin, is a well-known music educator who, in the 1970s and 1980s, recorded and published over 50 cassettes and videos depicting Israeli children's play-songs, street-songs, holiday and seasonal songs, and singing games targeting academic skills.
"So quite apart from the research experience, working on this was like a second childhood," she noted.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Videos to exercise your hands clapping skills
There are lots of hands clapping songs at www.funclapping.com
Clapping hands and laughter
If you decide to start clapping hands for health reasons, then get the most of your practice by adding a song to it! Here is how, as suggested by Laughter Yoga:
Beat the following 1-2, 1-2-3 rhythm with your hands as you chant in synchronicity “Ho, Ho, Ha-Ha-Ha.”
You will also find plenty of sound and safe hands clapping activities for grown ups online .
If looking for a miracle cure for serious ailments then you can clap your way to good health. Crush chronic illness with your hands, says K.C. Bhardwaj, a 76-year-old self-styled yogi of Mandali village near Phagwara. He claims to have invented “clapping yogasana’.
His creative ‘asana’ was mocked at first by village residents, who called him a lunatic for waking them up daily before the break of dawn.
However, as the therapy worked, many are now themselves responsible for the noise clapping to keep good health.
“Over a decade back I was looking for a miracle cure to glaucoma. I had started lose vision in both eyes. I did not have the courage to undergo surgery. It was then I heard at a ‘satsang’ that clapping could cure diseases and that was why devotees clapped while reciting kirtans.”
Clapping stimulates blood circulation and removes all obstructions in the veins and arteries, including bad cholesterol. Bhardwaj claims that even the World Health Organisation (WHO) confirmed it as best exercise. “I regained my vision in about a year just by clapping for about half an hour every morning,” he reveals.
Explaining the method, he said before clapping one should apply coconut or mustard oil on the palms so that it was absorbed by the body. Wear socks and leather shoes to check leakage of energy waves generated in the body. Strike both hands against each other, right to left, keeping them straight facing each other and the arms a little loose. Fingertips and the palm of each hand should strike each other, advises Bhardwaj.
Initially, he says, clap 200 to 300 times the first day and increase the speed from 50 to 100 claps a minute and duration to about 20 minutes. A healthy person, who wants to keep fit, should clap 1,500 times a day.
Telling about the benefits of clapping, Bhardwaj claims the problems that would vanish over a period of time. Life threatening heart conditions, hypertension, and diabetes, depression, asthma, common cold, and arthritis, headaches, insomnia and hair loss could be cured by clapping, he says.
“Besides recognition from my students, my efforts also landed me and my ‘invention’ in the Limca Book of Records in 1997, for clapping 9,500 times; 158 claps in a minute, which was heard a km away during early morning hours,” notes Bhardwaj.
His advice to the people living in air-conditioned houses and working in offices, who do not sweat at all: clap as it would help blood circulation in the body and cleanse it fully.
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