How to Buddy tape your fingers

There are many materials you can use to buddy tape two fingers together that I will review here, but the goals of buddy taping is the same, no matter which method you use.

The point of buddy taping is to use the next-door-neighbour finger to support the injured one. Since you don’t have as much of a problem moving the health finger, it brings your injured one along for the ride. Buddy taping is used when we need your fingers to stay moving, so they don’t get stiff while you’re recovering from your injury.

Buddy taping is not useful for ALL finger injuries. Sometimes we HAVE to immobilize the injured finger. So please don’t buddy tape unless you’ve been told to do it by a physician or a hand therapist. And if you’ve been told to buddy tape, please don’t splint or immobilize your injured finger unless you’ve been told to do it by a physician or a hand therapist.

The most important part of buddy taping is this:

We want your fingers to be able to bend and straighten as normally as possible while taped. This means that whatever you use to tape, that it should not keep you from bending your fingers almost all the way down into a claw fist.

What’s a claw fist? A claw fist is when you touch your finger tips down to the base of your finger. A regular fist is when you touch your finger tips down to the middle of palm of your hand.

I have had patients buddy tape their fingers will all kinds of tape. It really depends on what works for you, what you are doing, and whether or not the tape is okay for your skin.

The most common tapes we use for buddy taping are:

1) Cloth or hockey tape

2) Coban or self-adhesive tape/wrap

3) Pre-fabricated velcro tapes

Prefabricated velcro tapes are almost impossible to find in drug stores and medical supply stores. They’re usually provided by our hand therapists if they have them. But they’re not always available. Although they’re somewhat easier to put on and take off, they’re really for people who have pretty low activity levels because they tend to slip with heavier or prolonged activity/work. They also get dirty easily. They can be beneficial for patients who need to wash their hands a lot because they’re easy-on and easy-off, but the problem is that they can’t always be cleaned to a COVID standard.

For patients who work in dirty environment or in places where sweat or moisture is an issue, I always recommend cloth tape or hockey tape. The adhesive or glue keeps the tape from slipping, whereas the other options don’t have any glue. I recommend cloth tape to most health care workers such as floor nurses and PSW’s as well. It means cleaning your hands takes a bit more time since you have to change the tape every time, but over the long run, cloth tape is much less expensive. Some of my patients have preferred electrical tape or even duct tape; and I think these are all fine as long as your skin can stand it. A lot of choosing your buddy tape material comes down to trial and error, depending on your job.

For patients who have a lot of swelling, which prevents finger movement, and who don’t have heavy jobs or tasks, I usually recommend Coban or self-adhesive wrap or non-adhesive tape. Coban is the brand name of the tape, and is made specifically by 3M. I haven’t seen it available in drug stores like Shoppers Drug Mart or London Drugs (in Western Canada), so it’s pretty unlikely you’ll find it by the name Coban. I like self-adhesive wrap because it has some stretchiness to it and actually applies compression to the fingers, keeping them from getting too swollen. The downside to using self-adhesive wrap is that if you’re doing something heavier, it tends to roll up on itself.

I have patients who use self-adhesive wrap at home and overnight and then switch to using tape during the day because of their jobs. You’ll figure out what’s right for you.

Buddy taping with tape is slightly different than buddy taping with self-adhesive wrap. So review them both and then choose. When you tape, you tape to the next-door-neighbour finger. In the case of the index finger and the little finger, you only have one choice: The index finger has to be taped to the middle finger, and the little finger has to be taped to the ring finger. But if it’s the middle finger or the ring finger, you can choose which finger is more practical for your task.

1) Buddy taping with cloth tape

The key to buddy taping with cloth tape is not to tape over your finger creases or knuckles. You place the tape between finger creases or knuckles. This is because there is no stretchiness to cloth tape, so when you bend your fingers, and you’ve taped over knuckles, it won’t let you bend very far, which is working AGAINST the reason we want to buddy tape in the first place. For this reason, you cannot use 1” tape. It’s too wide. However, you can either by 0.5” tape or just cut or tear the 1” tape in half. Cloth tape and duct tape are easier to tear. Electrical tape has to be cut if it’s too wide.

2) Buddy taping with self-adhesive wrap

The advantage to using self-adhesive wrap is that it is stretchy, so we don’t have to worry as much about taping over finger knuckles. And since we are usually also trying to control swelling, taping the whole finger is what we want.

Always wrap from the tip of your finger down to the base. If you go in the other direction, you’ll just drive the swelling to your fingertip, which can be painful.

Make sure you only overlap the wrap by half each time you wind it around the finger. This is so that it’s not too thick, which would prevent you from moving it.

You can choose to stretch it out and wrap or wrap with it unstretched. I prefer to have some stretch on it because it seems to help with swelling a little better, but some hand therapists prefer it unstretched because they feel most people end up putting some unintentional stretch on it and we want to avoid over stretching the wrap which can cause pain. You will figure out the right tension for you over time, so I’m not too worried about it. If your finger starts turning purple, it’s too tight.

Special cases:

A lot of my patients work jobs that require them to wear gloves. Sometimes, it’s their gloves and other times, it’s disposable gloves. Again, it’s a royal pain in the butt to have to do this every time you change gloves, but it is usually necessary to protect your injury while it is healing. The trick to buddy taping with gloves is to buddy tape your gloves. If you use the same work gloves, then you can usually just set it and forget it. You un-tape your fingers before you put your gloves on, and slip on the taped glove and now you’re buddy taped with gloves!

If you’re using disposable gloves, buddy taping is a pain in the butt and unfortunately there isn’t a lot I can offer you in terms of tips. It does mean that you have to tape each pair of gloves that you use. This is one of those times where talking with your employer about how you can best be a productive team member is really useful, since you will be losing time while you tape with each pair of gloves you put on. This is incredibly challenging with health care workers since it normally takes seconds to put on a pair of gloves.