How to Keep Your Hands Warm on a Ski Lift

Tomas Sbertoli: Hi! I am Tomas Sbertoli, Director of Snowsports here at Wintergreen Resort in Virginia. One little tip, so that you can have for those cold winter days, is a way to keep your hands warm when you are riding down the lift. Bring your arm enclosed to your body, tip your hand out at 90 degrees and just shrug your shoulder. That keeps the blood pumped from that artery underneath the arm down into the hand and by pinching the backside of the hand without blood would return. You are pulling up nice and warm blood into the hands to keep them warm.

One of the things you want to be careful on cold days is that is the skin become more cold. What's it actually doing is just, kind of, freezing. The capillaries are the smallest of the blood vessels in your hands and when you rub them or slap them, what you are doing is actually breaking those capillaries and making your hands colder. That's when they start to become white and frosted. So you don't want to rub or slap your hands. It is better to just pump blood down into them. So this system of bringing the arm enclose to the body and pinching off to return, pump blood down there and warm the hands without doing any damage to the capillaries in the hand.