Medial Epicondylitis - Rehab exercise advice, anyone?
 

Bah. Sorry for the long post. Here's the short version: Golfer's elbow - what rehab exercises have you tried that have helped you fix it?

=========================

Does anyone have some good suggestions for exercises to rehab medial epicondylitis (golfer's elbow)? I fell off a tightrope about a week and a half ago, landing pretty rough and messing up my right elbow. It wasn't anything awful through typical "daily life" ROM, but it got bad outside of that. It's improved substantially, but there are still remnants of it, primarily during:

- pronation of the forearm with the elbow locked out
- supporting a load with the elbow locked out (eg. a handstand)
- hyperextension of the wrist with the elbow fully flexed (eg. the rack position)

Since the injury, I've been doing a lot of:
- rice bucket work, only going to finger-depth, focusing on finger extension and pronation/supination of the hand, generally going for 2x5:00 on each hand (takes that long to feel any "burn")
- super-light forearm rollers (2kg)
- super light wrist-push-ups (cf. Coach Sommer's gymnastics stuff)
- some wrist stretching
- massaging the arm, from the wrist to the neck, with a golf ball
- icing, or more recently, alternately applying ice and heat
- taking fish oil (6g of EPA/DHA per day, but it's Costco's brand, which may be of dubious quality)
- unweighted forearm pronation/supination throughout the day (eg. when at a stoplight), for what probably totals a couple hundred "reps"


I had also been taking a good deal of ibuprofen (four of five 200mg per day), which I learned yesterday might be more of a hindrance than a help, so I cut that out. Also, I realized chins (unweighted) don't make for a good rehab exercise either, but I only did them on two days and won't be doing them again until I'm better.

Is there anything more or less I should be doing? Any advice from people "in the know" or who have experienced and successfully rehabbed a similarly severe case of golfer's elbow would be appreciated. This is a pretty huge impediment to my training, so I'd really like to see it gone.

take a look at slow loaded eccentrics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtR8fYEUnXI

i've got some nasty Lateral Epicondylitis i'm battling rigth now. loaded eccentrics make it feel better, as does ART which I just started and 3 sessions in I'm way ahead.

Look up Tyler Twist, or Reverse Tyler Twist (I forget which one is for which side of the elbow).

Longer time off than you think you need is needed....as soon as my left elbow/arm was getting back up to 90% I'd do something stupid and reaggravate it and I was back almost from the beginning. It's only been years later that now it seems to finally be at 100% though I still feel a twinge or 2 here and there.

Huh. That looks like a much better way to do wrist flexion in an isometric way than doing overhand forearm rollers eccentrically... I'll look into getting one of those flexbars if they're cheap, since I'm betting I'll probably f' up my elbows again in the future. Is there anything hand/wrist related they're good for?

In the meanwhile, it makes me think that doing an underhand forearm roller might let me do it a bit more effectively. I can't believe I hadn't thought of that before.


Damn - what kind of injury did you sustain and how long did you give yourself to recover?

Simliar to you but my left arm:

http://www.performancemenu.com/forum...hlight=forearm

That was the thread I threw up back in 2008

The stupid things I did to reinjure myself after feeling better was:
Fall 2008 - Kipping pullups - curious how many...and hurt again.
Early Spring 2009 - pullups during an Army PT session

Like I said earlier it's better now but I still feel twinges when I do elbow rotations and nerve glides. Knowing what I know now I'd go back and do only hard Lower body stuff, ditch all upper stuff other than prehab type stuff.

Allen, I dropped all the upper-body stuff (except rehab) as soon as I was injured. Unfortunately, I essentially dropped all lower-body stuff a few weeks ago (doesn't fit in with my goals), which leaves me with pretty much nothing to do right now. I can't even do ab work, since all of my favorites there involve the elbow (ab wheels, barbell windmills, hanging leg raises, human flags). It kind of sucks. I'm just doing a bunch of rehab work and flexibility stuff until this heals.

Ok, wow, that wasn't helpful at all. Definitely made the joint feel stiff, ow. Strike that one off the list...




This injury gets me thinking that I probably ought to do start doing more dedicated grip work for hand/wrist/elbow prehab. Do you guys know of any good places to learn about the basics of how to train that stuff? I know there's GripBoard.com, but I've heard they're a bit fanatical over there and I'm not quite sure how much help is available there for beginners.

Diesel Crew!

Eccentrics are the way to go...

Right. I had forgotten about them. Thanks.

Well, I've been doing eccentrics on the forearm roller - the concentric portion too, but really dragging out the eccentric - and they've been helping, but it's not a magical, instantaneous cure.