the reason your hands are spinning out of control is because you're using the outer rotate ring. with this outer rotate ring maya decides how far your object rotates in all 3 axes in order to take your object from where it started to where it finished. it's safer to use the red, green, and blue rings in the rotate tool because those represent rotation in ONLY the x, y, or z axes... whichever you grab, the other two won't be affected.

an expression would definitely help to maintain a constant velocity.