Smart Way of Hand Washing Kata

The following hand-cleaning techniques demonstrate ancient hand-washing secrets and martial arts moves known as the Smart Way of Hand Washing Kata.

Top Two Overlooked Handwashing

Techniques

1. Wash your soapy hands without having water flowing over them.
2. Scrub your hands for at least twenty seconds so that the soap can remove most of the stickiness that keeps germs attached.

Scrubbing the Places Where Pathogens Hide

Fingertips Circular Palm

• Rub your left palm with the bottom of your fingertips in a circular motion.
• Scrub vigorously while applying pressure.
• Do not use your fingernails to scrub your palms.
• Repeat the technique on the other hand.

Knuckle Palm

• Rub your palm with your knuckles in a circular motion.
• Scrub vigorously while applying pressure.
• Repeat the technique on the other hand.

Back-and-Forth, Up-and-down

Interlinked Fingers

• Scrub back and forth at the base of your fingers where they join your hand.
• Repeat the technique on the other hand.
• Place your right hand on the back of the left hand with fingers interlinked.
• Vigorously rub up and down along the length of your fingers.
• Repeat the technique on the other hand.

Double-clenched Fist

• Place your fingertips in the palm of your opposite hand.
• Rub the backs of your linked fingers while rubbing the opposing palms with your knuckles.
• Repeat this technique with the other hand.

Fingers Palm

• Place your fingertips in the palm of your opposite hand.
• Rub the backs of your linked fingers while rubbing the opposing palms with your knuckles.
• Repeat this technique with the other hand.

Cleansing Thumb

• Rub around your right thumb using a rotational motion with your left hand.
• Repeat the technique on the other hand.

Rotating Handcuff

• Wrap your right hand around your left wrist and rotate forward and back.
• Repeat the technique on the other hand.

Fingertip and Cuticle

• Use the base of your index finger to scrub back and forth around the cuticles of your fingertips.
• Use the technique on all fingers and both thumbs.

{Hand model: Meggan Anderson, Photographer: Matt Crotteau}

I might use only three or four of these techniques when I wash my hands, depending on where I might have been contaminated. You should pick and choose which techniques to apply each time you wash your hands using the same criteria.

If I used my bare hand to turn a doorknob when entering the office break room, I would focus on scrubbing my palm creases and the spaces between my fingers.

The hands in the photos should have had natural, unpainted fingernails because studies show that fingernail polish flakes and chips off the nails, leaving infectious matter behind. The hand photos for the Kata series featured white hands with red nail polish against a solid black background. I went for Art composition this time.

The last technique presented, Fingertip and Cuticle, has been in use for thousands of years, though I haven’t seen it listed on any modern handwashing posters or instructions.

You can find similar handwashing information on hundreds of websites.

The Centers for Disease Control have a Guideline for Hand Hygiene in Health Care Settings. (30)

Disclaimer: This handwashing hygiene information is distributed without any warranty of any kind. The interpretation of this material, either expressed or implied, is the responsibility of the reader.

Family-Centered Approach to Happy, Healthy

Hands

My mom, a surgical nurse, seldom complained about anything, but one thing never failed to raise her ire, and I certainly enjoyed her re-enactments when she got home. Sometimes she was funny, but at other times she was angry when confronting women with long nails who, after using the toilet, rinsed their hands without soap. Mom used to imitate the person, wiggling just the tips of her fingers pointed down as if she were at a wash basin, and then shaking her butt. When she stopped moving her fingertips, her butt stopped shaking, too. “Oooh, the water’s too coooold,” she would croon.

Just one bacterium can infect any one of us with a serious, long-term illness or even a life-threatening disease. Infection prevention starts with 1) effective hand-washing techniques and 2) a germ-freak awareness of where the most contaminated germ-infested areas are in the workplace, at home, and in the world as we go about our day-to-day activities.

The best and most powerful way to help our children maintain healthy resident bacteria is for parents to teach them the most effective methods to avoid touching contaminated surfaces and objects.

The reality is that this is often an unreasonable request or goal because we want our kids to play ball, jump rope, and socialize with their playmates. I do not want my children to be stigmatized or afraid to use a public restroom or to share their crayons.

A big shout-out to the future of handwashing social justice.

Habit Formation and Rational Addiction: A Field Experiment in Handwashing, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (31)Abstract: Regular handwashing with soap is believed to have substantial impacts on child health in the developing world.

Explanations as to why we perform certain actions for hand hygiene are helpful, but the seal-the-deal motivational action is when a child watches how Mommy or Daddy continually practice effective handwashing techniques, such as the ones described in the

Smart Way of Handwashing Kata.

It’s up to us to prepare our children for a lifetime of entering a hostile, life-threatening, pathogen-ridden world that exists just on the other side of the public restroom zone door.