Elbow Pain Treatment #1
Chances are that the pain in your elbow is the consequence of a muscle imbalance or soft tissue restriction elsewhere in your body.
For example, if you lack proper tissue length in your pecs and/or lats you will struggle when trying to externally rotate your shoulder . You can only get away with this for so long until you have to press something over your head.
The two options here are to get a massage from a licensed professional or use daily self myofascial release on your upper back, pecs, biceps, and lats. The better you move throughout your upper body, the better your elbows will feel.
What Does Tennis Elbow Feel Like
The sensation of tennis elbow is a unique one. Its a pain surrounding the bony area of your elbow and it can travel through your upper and lower arm. However, that isnt always the case. Even though the feeling itself is centralized in your elbow, you may notice pain when doing certain activities with your hand.
Its a strange sensation for sure. Id almost compare it to the feeling when you accidentally bash your elbow up against a wall or something and then feel those tingles. It doesnt actually feel like that exactly, but I feel theyre worth comparing because its just as difficult of a sensation to actually describe to someone.
The amazing thing to me is that when its bad, it can be painful to lift a can of soda. However, I can pick my dog up off the floor with no problem. Its not so much about an object being heavy, as it is the angle or position that your arm is in when you reach out to grab something.
At the time of this writing, theres a slight pain when I pick up my cup of coffee. However, it was far worse the last time I had tennis elbow, which was about 2 years ago. Id have pain even picking up a pencil.
What Is Tennis Elbow Pain
Usually, the tennis elbow is an uncomfortable feeling around your elbows. In medical terms, the condition is also known as lateral epicondylitis. It is a swelling in your forearm’s tendons, so the common site of pain is the surrounding muscles. The pain is uncomfortable and can be a hurdle in performing day-to-day tasks.
Tendons attach muscles to the bones, so the pain in this region can affect your overall elbow. Often, people assume that only tennis players are prone to the problem, which is not true. The main reason for the condition is the overuse of the muscles, and so anyone can experience it at any time.
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Mistake #: Lifting Too Heavy
How can you lift a whale when your joints are only strong enough to lift a dolphin?
This is the problem many guys exhibit in the gym. Whenever a fella is committing mistake #1, chances are the weight is too heavy. Even if you use proper technique, extremely heavy weight can put tremendous stress on your elbow joints overtime. However, the elbow issues occur mostly because the load exceeds their current strength levels.
Plenty of fellas do this when doing bench press or bicep curls. They will arch their back to help lift the weight up. This is just wrong, wrong, wrong! This not only hurts your elbow, but strains your lower back. Unless you want to walk like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, I suggest you stop doing this. Better yet, reduce the weight to avoid this mistake as well as mistake #1.
Is It Ok To Lift Weights With Tennis Elbow
It depends on the severity of the tennis elbow. If the tennis elbow causes “low to mild” pain, most people can use elbow sleeves, elbow brace, elbow wraps, elbow straps, or other short-term pain relief remedies to reduce tennis elbow pain when lifting. If the tennis elbow is chronic and severe, or causes sharp pain in the elbow when lifting weights, it’s best to treat the root cause of the pain before resuming exercising.
Check out this article for more information about post-workout elbow pain treatment, short term remedies, as well as the fastest way to cure the root cause of tennis elbow.
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When To Seek Help
Elbow pain can be very frustrating for weightlifters. Sometimes its best to consult with an expert. Seek help if your elbow pain has lasted longer than 2 weeks, if you cant lift without modifying your route, are having trouble with your daily tasks, or are unable to work because of your elbow pain. If you experience numbness or tingling, we recommend having your elbow examined right away to help determine the root cause. Check out more information on our Lifting Injury Treatment page or visit with one of our experts. We make getting expert advice easy. Get your questions by one of our lifting specialists with free 15-minute screening appointment.
Overview Of Elbow Anatomy
The radius, ulna, and humerus are the three bones that make up the elbow. The joint is additionally held together by muscles, ligaments, and tendons. Epicondyles are two bony bumps at the bottom of the humerus that link the forearm muscles and tendons to the elbow. The lateral epicondyle is located on the outside of the elbow, whereas the medial epicondyle is located on the inside.
The elbow joint allows for four primary functions: flexion, extension, supination, and pronation. Golfers elbow and tennis elbow are two of the most common injuries sustained by those doing strength training exercises. Golfers and tennis players arent the only ones affected by these conditions, despite their names.
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Should I Workout If My Elbow Hurts
It depends on the severity of the elbow injury and pain. If the elbow injury creates “low to mild” pain, most people can use elbow joint support sleeves, elbow wraps or other short-term pain relief remedies to reduce pain temporarily. If the elbow injury is chronic and severe, and creates sharp pain in the elbow tendon and elbow joint, it’s best to treat the root cause of the elbow injury before resuming working out.
Visit Orthobethesda For Elbow Treatment
If youre experiencing pain that radiates from the outside of your elbow and down to your forearm and wrist, you could have tennis elbow. This injury not only causes discomfort, but it can also be associated with weakness while performing activities like turning a doorknob and holding a mug of coffee. OrthoBethesda is here to provide premium elbow treatment to patients who encounter any of these symptoms.
Those living in Bethesda, MD, and the surrounding area are invited to give us a call at or contact us online today. Our orthopedic specialists would be pleased to meet with you to work out a treatment plan that helps target your specific symptoms.
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How Can I Prevent Elbow Pain When Lifting
The ideal way to prevent elbow pain is to have your tendons trained for the upcoming load. First, gradually work on improving your grip strength. You can practice pinching and gripping kettlebells or plates for a strength training routine. As we covered above, eccentric strengthening exercises for your wrist and forearm muscles are key to fixing this type of tendinitis, but can also be helpful to help prevent as well. Heavy, slow resistance strengthening can also help train your elbow tendons to withstand a greater load. Perform wrist curls and reverse curls with a weight that provides a rate of perceived exertion of about 8 out of 10. Slowly curl for 3 seconds and lower for 3 seconds. Repeat until tired and perform three sets.
Another key muscle group to properly train are your posterior shoulder muscles and mid-back. When these pulling muscles are weak, we tend to overuse our forearm and hand muscles. Ensure your strength routine does not neglect your posterior deltoid and lower trapezius muscles. Rows that pull your shoulder blades together and downward activate the lower trapezius. Our Learn To LIft Program can help you identify issues with your form and teach you the proper way to balance your strength routine. If you are a seasoned lifter, then our Lifting Performance Packagesmay help you take your PRs to the next level.
Elbow Pain Treatment #2
This goes along with #1 as it relates to the mobility of your upper extremities. If your elbows, wrists, and shoulders are tight you risk damaging the soft tissue around these joints .
In conjunction with foam rolling and SMR, it is a good idea to stretch these areas after improving the quality of the tissue.
One stretch I have become a huge fan of using with many of my clients is the elbow and wrist flexors stretch. You extend your elbow and wrist and gently use your opposite hand to pull them into greater extension.
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Should You Wear A Strap Or Brace While Lifting Weights
Maybe. I would NOT recommend wearing any kind of rigid or even semi-rigid brace around the entire elbow, because its potentially too restrictive
Weight lifting straps that encircle the wrist and strap-type braces, like the CounterForce Brace, which encircles the upper forearm muscles, may make sense temporarily.
As long as you only use them while working out and never while at rest or performing low-intensity repetitive tasks, like typing.
How To Prevent Tennis Elbow
The key to preventing tennis elbow is to avoid overuse. Stop if you feel any elbow pain during an activity.
You may also bring on tennis elbow by using the wrong equipment, like a golf club or tennis racket that is too heavy or that has a grip that is too large. Bad technique — like using the wrong posture for a swing — can also lead to tennis elbow. You should also:
- Stretch and warm up before any sport or activity that will exercise your elbow or arm.
- Ice your elbow after exercise.
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Keep Up With Your Cardio Exercise At Least
If you have Tennis Elbow or Golfers Elbow you can certainly continue with your cardiovascular exercise
Continuing your cardio and lower body workouts is not only acceptably but highly desirable from a stay fit and healthy perspective, and also to maintain good circulation and healing in your injured upper body.
To stop everything would be to invite more stagnation and degeneration, and those are your absolute worst enemies when you have a tendon injury!
But what about weights? Should you continue to lift weights or do upper body strength training? It depends
One of the main concerns and deciding factors is whether you developed your Tennis Elbow injury from over exercising/ weight lifting in the first place, in which case, you might need to cut back or stop your upper body strengthening routine for a while.
- If your injury stems from some other activity, then it may not be necessary to stop your workouts
- And you may need to drop certain exercises entirely for a time, because they can be too aggravating to your Tennis Elbow.
Common Weight Lifting Mistakes That Lead To Tennis Elbow
by matt
Ouch! Is your elbow giving you the blues? Well youre not alone. Millions of repetitive task hand workers suffer from elbow pain every day. Lateral epicondylitis affects men more than women. It mainly strikes those between the ages of 30 and 50, although people of any age can be affected.
This pain is commonly referred to as tennis or golfers elbow. You guessed itthis is an injury that is common for golf and tennis players. According to the Cleveland Clinic up to 50% of tennis players suffer from elbow tendonitis. This condition is caused by overuse of arm, forearm, wrist and hand muscles that results in elbow pain.
Tennis/golfers elbow might result from:
This injury isnt limited to the likes of Serena Williams and Tiger Woods.
Elbow pain is also common for those who perform a job that requires repetitive arm or grip movements such as carpentry and desk jobs. Another is by lifting weights.
If your elbows feel like somebody lights a match on them every time you raise your hand, then it may be due to these eight weight lifting mistakes.
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Acute Vs Chronic Elbow Pain
What is acute elbow pain? Acute elbow pain is an inflammatory pain experienced during or immediately after lifting weights.
- Burning pain in the elbow joint after lifting
- A sensation of heat, swelling, or redness around the elbow joint after working out
- Sore elbow after lifting
- Elbow pain when bending and straightening arm after lifting
Inflammation is a process where your immune system releases chemicals to fight and protect the body from infections and injuries. Lifting a weight that’s too heavy or using a bad weightlifting form can strain and cause injury to muscles and tendons. When this happens, it triggers your body’s inflammatory response.
The inflammatory response creates pain and discomfort in the elbow immediately after lifting or the day after working out. Acute elbow inflammation typically lasts a few days to a few weeks. When the inflammation symptoms do not go away and, the pain lasts more than three months, it becomes a chronic condition.
What is chronic elbow pain? Elbow pain is defined as chronic when the elbow injury does not heal, and the pain continues for more than three months. Depending on the stage of the tendonitis, an athlete with chronic elbow injury may experience:
- Dull and nagging pain in the elbow after lifting
- Burning pain in the elbow joint after lifting
- Pain and discomfort when bending and straightening the arm after lifting
- Sore elbow after lifting
- Elbow joint stiffness
- Sharp and severe elbow ache while lifting or gripping weights
Lifting Weights With Tennis Elbow Pain
When the time is right, lifting weights with tennis elbow is an important part of the recovery process. However, it is crucial to understand how to lift correctly and when it is the right time to start. Keep reading to learn more about how to strengthen your elbow and forearm muscles.
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S To Fixing Tennis Elbow Pain While Lifting Weight
DMOOSE
Personal Trainer and Fitness Expert Sat, Nov 06, 21
Written by Joe Wlison on Nov 06, 2021
When you lift heavy weight during exercise, you are likely to experience some pain in your elbows. The most common type of pain that everyone is prone to be tennis elbow pain. Even though the name of the condition implies to tennis players, but the situation is otherwise. You can also experience tennis elbow pain at any point.
Lifting heavy weight is a major cause of elbow pain. The majority of the people who have experienced tennis elbow pain do not accurately identify the pain. After a correct diagnosis of the pain, you need to work on your treatment. The process of dealing with pain is a bit slow, but there are some tips that you can do to fix the pain.
You will get thorough information about tennis elbow pain in this article. Apart from that, you will know some important tips to effectively deal with the situation.
How To Permanently Cure Elbow Pain
What is the TitaniumPhysique 3-Step Formula? The TitaniumPhysique 3-Step Formula is the fastest wayto cure chronic tendonitis and pain from lifting weights, including:
It’s based on cutting-edge and extensive scientific research relating to the following: tendinopathy, sports medicine, and sports injury, weight lifting injuries, musculoskeletal pain treatment and management, nutrition, supplementation, and strength therapy and conditioning.
As an athlete and weightlifter, I created TitaniumPhysique for athletes and anyone who does weight training. I’ve combined these scientific studies and nine years of experience as a personal trainer, nutritionist, bodybuilder, physique athlete, and wellness coach to create the TitaniumPhysique Formula.
To learn how the TitaniumPhysique Formula works and why it heals chronic weight training tendonitis, check out this helpful article about tendonitis treatment.
Here is an overview of how to cure and counteract elbow tendonitis using the TitaniumPhysique 3-Step Formula:
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Fix Chronic Inflammation To Get Better
The food you eat is critical in getting rid of inflammatory pain. It will cause and aggravate inflammation in the body or fight pain and provide relief. According to The China Study, the most comprehensive scientific study on nutrition, animal foods, and animal food products aggravate inflammation in the gastrointestinal tract.
Combined with the stress frequent and prolonged weight lifting creates on the tendons and joints, the body unavoidably gets into a chronic inflammatory state. This systemic cycle of inflammatory foods and physical fitness is one of the primary reasons most athletes experience tendonitis after a few months of weight training.
Joint supplements cannot fix chronic inflammation from weight training because it is a systemic problem. To cure chronic elbow tendonitis, you can use a simple two-week whole-food plant-based regimen to reset and eliminate chronic inflammation in the body.
The food you eat is more important than anything your doctor can give you to cure disease and pain. A plant-based diet can help eliminate joint pain and reverse chronic diseases like arthritis.
– The China Study Solution: The Simple Way to Lose Weight and Reverse Illness, Using a Whole-Food, Plant-Based Diet.
Can a Whole-Food Plant-Based Diet Heal Elbow Tendonitis?
Is a whole-food plant-based diet right for you? Can a plant-based nutrition regimen help you eliminate chronic inflammatory elbow pain? The following five questions can help you decide:
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