The question of what goes on inside of the body when you crack your knuckles has finally been answered, and it isn’t quite the same as what we’ve been told growing up.
Cracking your knuckles is a habit that some people just can’t break, and there’s something that’s got to be said about feeling the pop of knuckle, and the release of tension in your hand.
It’s just hard to give up.
But throughout the ages, you might have heard some things about the act, and its risks to your health.
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From making your knuckles bigger, to giving you arthritis, there have been many rumours about the habit.
Usually, people tell you that when you pop a knuckle, it expands the air between the joints, essentially building pressure that causes these health complications.
But according to a simulation by Zack D Films, this pressure does happen, but the implications are not as dramatic as that.
His YouTube clip features an internal look into a person’s knuckle as the cracking occurs, which shows how the space between the joints ‘stretches’ as pressure is applied by the individual cracking.
Apparently, once this space expands, the ‘pressure drops’ and gas bubbles form, which pop, causing the sound we’re all familiar with.
However, those bubbles take around 30 minutes to ‘come back’, which is ‘why it’s impossible’ to crack the same knuckle within that time period.
Greg Kawchuk, a professor in the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Alberta, spoke with Science Alert and explained that this was caught on an MRI machine, where you can see ‘very clearly what is happening inside the joints.’
He said of the gas bubbles: "It's a little bit like forming a vacuum. As the joint surfaces suddenly separate, there is no more fluid available to fill the increasing joint volume, so a cavity is created and that event is what's associated with the sound."
As for whether this can cause arthritis in the long run, a researcher named Donald Unger tested this theory out.
For 50 years, Unger only cracked the knuckles on his left hand twice a day and not on the right hand.
He published the results in 2004, stating that both hands saw no difference.
So, it seems like it’s all just an old wives tale, and whether you choose to crack them or not – there's not going to be some crazy side effect.
Britt Jones