I’m pretty sure I know how I injured it. I’ve been focused on body weight workouts. Lots of chin/pull-ups, hanging ab work, dips, working my way up to a front lever.
Bragging aside, the elbow pain started a month ago and I thought I could push through it. Turns out, not so much. I took last week off to recover. Used ice two to three times a day. It started to feel maybe 50% better. Got back in the gym this week and now I’m back to 50% worse.
I obviously can’t hang (from a bar, that is). But I can’t do arm curls either. Can do shoulders but not the same weight and getting the dumb bell up tweaks my elbow so I probably need to knock it off. Push-ups don’t feel too bad but not great.
The link above says recovery can take 1 to 3 months. I’m more or less out of workout alternatives except cardio.
If you’ve ever had golfer’s elbow, what did you do to recover? What kind of workouts did you switch too? Is a cortisone injection something worth exploring? How effective did you find it? Did it speed up recovery?
My wife, who knows all the things, says cortisone is the way to go since I’m so impatient.
I’ll be seeing my doctor next week but thought it would be worthwhile to crowd-source experienced opinions.
There are arm wraps made specifically for elbow tendonitis. They are commonly found in most big grocery stores and are only like 20 bucks. They work surprisingly well. I’ve dealt with elbow issues for years.
Could it be that your forearm muscles are too strong in relation to your biceps? Do you do any hand squeezing exercises? I’ve had something like you described rest and using triceps exercises helped.
I don’t do grip exercises specifically. I do triceps. I assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that gripping the bar holding my entire body weight would develop a reasonably good grip strength. (?)
Come to think… I have one of those spring loaded hand grip things. The one with individual finger springs. I’m going to give that a shot and see how that feels.
Other than the compression sleeves (which do help noticeably), the only real cure is to rest the tendon.
You could try deep massage, ice packs and stretching, all of which might help, but IMHO, the only way to really cure it is to not irritate it.
I gave it to myself in my left elbow (from doing wide-grip pullups to excess), and it took nearly a year of nursing it to get it to go away.
I’m back to the pullups, but I’m much more cognizant of the tell-tale signs that the tendon is getting irritated, and I lay off of them for awhile.
I had tennis elbow (or whichever) from re-organizing a storage room that had a lot of tall, heavy, upright wooden panels. I was picking them up by the sides and moving them, which was fine for my arms, but absolutely overloaded my fisty-grippy muscles, and it was a lingering injury that left me struggling to hold a cup of coffee.
A TheraBand Flexbar helped my recovery immensely. It was absolutely, deliciously targetting exactly the right muscles (using the Tyler Twist). Worth looking into.
I’ve had it among other injuries. I basically didn’t do anything where I could feel the pain above a 2 pain rating (yeah, ratings are subjective, but you get the idea).
Right now I have a partially ruptured distal biceps tendon. I work out hard, but I do the exercises where the pain isn’t too bad. Reverse curls are too painful, so I skip them. Dumbbell benching too painful, so I do more fly type exercises. Pronated grip pull downs hurt, so I do neutral grip. Mess around until you find the exercises that give you a minimum amount of pain, or you’re just going to prolong healing time.
I found this:
I would assume the same for golfer’s elbow.
I used to be really into forearm exercises and built some pretty impressive forearms. I can give you recommendations if you like, but I don’t think it would help your issue. If anything, it would probably aggravate it as:
Well I wear it all day long but I use my arms more regularly than most people. But yes, you will suffer no side effects from wearing it, what can it hurt? Regular, consistent icing is also verry effective. But that takes a degree of commitment.
A strap for grip assistance such as this one (Versa Gripps) could help take your forearms out of many pulling exercises. By using these, you put all of the resistance on the intended muscle, rather than your grip. Shrugs, pull ups and rowing exercises can greatly benefit from something like Versa Gripps. They are also MUCH easier to use than standard grip wraps.
Wrong. The point is to keep the tendon from stretching and getting further irritation. That may be above or below the area of injury. I don’t know, but compressing the point of injury may make it worse. It’s can be difficult to do yourself, but you can grab the arm at different points with your other hand or the aid of someone else to find the spot where the pain diminishes as you rotate and/or flex your elbow.
I’m not going to advise on that, but the problem with tendon injuries is the poor blood supply to the tendons and heat would tend to improve that while ice reduces it.
