4 Things to Do if You're Suffering From Elbow Pain

Are you a tennis player suffering with Elbow pain? According to the Cleveland clinic, anywhere from 10-50% of tennis players will suffer from tennis elbow in their career. Tennis elbow if left untreated can develop into a larger problem that could sideline you from tennis for weeks. We offer services that can not only treat this condition, but can prevent injuries like this from happening in the future. Tennis elbow and Golfers’ elbows are injuries to the muscles in your forearms that can eventually lead to tears in the tendon that these muscles attach to. Over time if these areas are not treated or looked at it can cause a lot of pain and can decrease your time on court. Here are a few tips on how work through this injury and can even prevent these injuries from happening:

1. Take a tennis ball/lacrosse ball to these muscles. Sit at a table with one of these balls and work both sides of your forearm by rolling this ball along these muscles and feel for these tender spots called trigger points. Once you find a trigger point press your other arm down on that spot where the ball is and hold for 1 minute. This will relax these muscles and help decrease risk for injury.

2. Work on grip strength. The stronger that these muscles are, the less stress goes into your elbow when you are hitting a tennis ball. One of our favorite drills to increase grip strength is a bell up kettlebell hold. Take a kettlebell with the cannonball part facing up and tuck your elbow into your side and squeeze the kettlebell hard and walk around. Make sure your wrist is straight and your elbow stays tucked into your side. This is great because your muscles have to balance to keep the kettlebell from not falling over. Another great exercise which you don’t need a weight/kettlebell for is what we call Snotty puppet. What you do is take a rubber-band around all 5 of your fingers and open you hand as wide as you can. We recommend doing 3 sets of 20 sometime throughout the day and the only equipment you need is a rubber band! Bonus tip: Grip strength is directly correlated to shoulder health, so if you have good grip strength that means you have less of a chance of developing a shoulder injury!

3. Stretching after you play. After repetitive stress into your elbow from hitting forehands backhands and serves for a few hours, your muscles tighten up and if you are not stretching these muscles after you play you will have a higher chance of hurting yourself. A simple and effective stretch is to stick your arm straight out and push down on your hand and then push up on your hand. You can hold each of these for 30 seconds which will only take 2 minutes of your time if you do both arms after you play!

4. Graston Technique. For those of you who are not familiar with Graston Technique, it is 100% stainless steel instruments that can help lengthen muscles that are overactive and can also heal tissue that is damaged by working on a cellular level to lay down a thicker type of tissue in that involved area and decrease the rate of reinjury into that area. Graston Technique for Lateral epicondylitis (Tennis Elbow) has shown a success rate of 90% for quicker and better healing compared to not having Graston Technique done.