The concept of kinematic synergies is proposed to address the dimensionality reduction problem in control and coordination of the human hand. This paper develops a method for extracting kinematic synergies from joint-angular-velocity profiles of hand movements. Decomposition of a limited set of synergies from numerous movements is a complex optimization problem. This paper splits the decomposition process into two stages. The first stage is to extract synergies from rapid movement tasks using singular value decomposition (SVD). A bank of template functions is then created from shifted versions of the extracted synergies. The second stage is to find weights and onset times of the synergies based on l(1) -minimization, whose solutions provide sparse representations of hand movements using synergies.