Should you stop cracking your knuckles? (bbc.com)

TL,DR: No, unless you're doing it so hard that you're straining your joints. But don't crack your neck.

This is good to read about, and nice that it has and research referenced.

It's interesting to know that it's gas collapsing. And nothing to do with the bone rubbing.

And it makes you wonder what chiropractors are actually doing when they're popping your back... It's probably not doing anything to help you with your pain. And it's probably not actually adjusting anything.

Not in my house. It's annoying.

Betteridge says?

Bruce Lee cracked his knuckles a lot, and he died in his 30s. He was in great shape too.

But I think it's mostly just escaping gases.

Edit: ^ is my way of asking why this is on HN, which I never do, cause then someone could ask the same about me.

Another question, has anyone noticed cracking knuckles being contagious like yarning? I often crack my knuckles and quite often see others noticing and doing it themselves.

This is a bit weird, but I started getting mild wrist pain from computer use in college, and I credit two things with reversing it. One was rock climbing which strengthened my forearms and wrists, and the other was developing a habit of cracking my wrist joints. I stopped rock climbing many years ago but I continue to crack my wrists to this day. The habit causes me to flex and stretch my wrists every so often while I'm working and I really think that has helped prevent the development of repetitive strain injuries from mouse and keyboard use.

Really BBC ?

Any muscle, back and joint pain should first be met with mild strengthening, mild weight loss and mild exercise. It's like turning your computer off and on. Mostly the problems go away. Then check for other things :) Keep remembering to relax and move, from your fingers to your wrists and shoulders. And keep trying different set-ups and equipment if you can. There is a pretty magic set-up for most people. 30+ years myself into being on a computer nearly all the time personally and professionally. Back is starting to hurt again. Time to take my own advice again :)

My grandpa (he was 10 when he was liberated from the Nazis by the US and remaining French troops) told me that a French general would always crack his wrists when someone didn't hurry up. Sometimes with drastic consequences. That is my memory of his story about it, whenever I hear that..

Within a few minutes of picking up a guitar my fingers start to stiffen up, I crack them and then all is well, been doing this for 30 odd years now and the joints of my hands are some of the few which don't cause me problems at this point in my life. I never could crack my knuckles before I started playing guitar and if I stop playing for a few weeks, I cease being able to crack my knuckles.

These articles on knuckle cracking never seem to say anything but state, but sort of maybe could be but your aunt is almost certainly wrong unless or maybe in certain exceptions. For the majority of people I think we crack our knuckles for the same reason we often stretch when we get up, it relieves a tension that needs relieving.

Highly agree with the article. If you don't have neck issues, don't pop that shit. Especially by twisting. Pulling sideways left or right, you're probably fine. Palm to chin and the other hand twisting the neck? Risky!

How often can this cracking be done at a time? Does the gas escape? Does it need time to form? And why can some people do it and others not?

Over my dead body.

I'm in my 60's, and I crack my knuckles dozens if not hundreds of times a day. I started very young, and I do every joint on both hands, every finger joint all the way up to the wrist. This is my hands while I deep think, and I think a lot. I'll do one hand, then the other, and go back to the first hand and repeat.

Due to this habit, I have researched the cause of the crack, and this article is absolutely nothing new whatsoever. The same information I've been reading for 50 years, since I was first "ordered" to stop.

For the record: zero issues. Zero ramifications beyond "stop that!" verbalized endlessly through out my life.

"No."

So, I can crack the 2nd and 3rd joints of my fingers just by flexing them. My thumbs don't crack, but I can push the first joint through the range of motion until it locks and pushes the knuckle out the palm side. I can also push my shoulders out of their sockets, getting about another 2 inches of reach. Are my fingers and shoulders just strangely double jointed or is this something different?

Cracking one's knuckles has been a thing that men do, that is: only a minority of women would be engaging in this, but men would pick it up in groups and it would become a custom. And of course, boys at a younger age would emulate the elder men, and so you had boys cracking their knuckles, and doing it at home, in front of their sisters and their mothers, and doing it in school in front of their teachers. And it is a blue-collar activity; something considered uncouth for the genteel knowledge-worker to do, except if you're acting in solidarity with the manual laborer, and you crack your knuckles as you sit down at the keyboard to type.

So the cracking of knuckles annoys people who don't do it, and it annoys women, and it annoys people in authority over young boys. So you want them to stop, and you want to regulate men's bodies and control what we do with our bodies. But you cannot tell us all the time "because I said so" or God forbid, "because it annoys me", because that can eventually achieve the opposite result.

So the medical myth of developing arthrosis and hurting your bones and damaging your joints, those were "old wives' tales" and "white lies" that were told in order to scare boys into stopping the activity. And perhaps even to scare husbands and employees into stopping. They tell men to stop spitting on the floor, to stop picking their nails with a pocket knife, and usually a medical excuse arises, because this is a higher authority that will terminate any individual choice or discretion in the way we treat our bodies.

My knuckles no longer crack when I'm in ketosis. I assume it's inflammation related but I've never heard anyone else mention this though.

So, I injured my left index finger to the point of tendon interruption. It was approx 2018. I was fortunate enough to have surgery that repaired it to near 100% extension.

So, I clearly have no synovial fluid at that joint. The tendons were in it, and so by necessity it was also violated.

I just popped that knuckles, and it sounds exactly like the others. Anyone have any ideas?

Some kids cracked their knuckles. It annoyed some older adults, and instead of telling them to stop they made up some bullshit reason. Classic non assertive behavior. The kids, being kids, believed them. They continued believing them into adulthood. Thus, it became a myth that was passed down.

Donald L. Unger got an Ig-nobel prize for cracking the knuckles on only one hand for 60 years. n=1 but evidence over a very long time