How can I get rid of elbow pain? Do I have tennis elbow? How can I resolve tennis elbow pain? Here are a couple of tips to answer your questions and to try and resolve pain.
Please remember that these tips and exercises should reduce any symptoms and if there is any increased pain, please stop and contact us for an assessment to determine if these are appropriate for you.
Hi, this is Rick from Body Works Sports Physiotherapy. Today I’m going to show you a couple exercises that I like to use in treating tennis elbow.
Classically, we think of tennis elbow as pain on the outer surface of the elbow. It can also involve pain with lifting and gripping, especially when reaching and away from the body. Obviously it gets more complicated than that, but these are a couple exercises that I’ve found work pretty well. They do take a little bit of practice to get used to.
Exercise 1: Gripping
- Keep your arm in close to your body and your thumb up to the ceiling
- Take your unaffected arm, grip the inside of your elbow. Apply a little bit of a force outward to the side.
- Once you’ve got the force applied out to the side, you’re going to grip and squeeze the towel
- Applying this force should either decrease or make your pain go all the way away compared to gripping without that force
By getting some repeated pain free motion while gripping a towel, it’s going to help to decrease your pain over time.
Exercise 2: Isometric Hold
- Take a band and wrap it around a door handle, then close the door with the band in it
- Now do the same thing: elbow at your side, thumb up to the ceiling, and apply a little bit of a force
- I’m just going to hold my wrist into a neutral posture to utilize all these muscles on the outside of the forearm.
Again these exercises are only effective if adding this lateral force helps to decrease your pain. If it doesn’t, we like to tweak it to suit your specific needs. That’s where it can be helpful to come into the clinic and discuss it one on one.
Give those a try. You want to start pretty small, and you shouldn’t feel any pain holding for about 30 seconds at max.