Get the Advantage Over Tennis Elbow
Introduction
Forehand - ouch! Backhand - ouch! Opening the peanut butter - ouch! Grabbing your laptop bag - ouch! Today, we're diving into the frustrating world of tennis elbow. Whether you’re a tennis player or someone who has been unlucky enough to encounter tennis elbow from less exciting pursuits (yardwork anyone?), tennis elbow is a painful condition that really affects your everyday quality-of-life. In this post, we'll explore what tennis elbow is, why it happens, and (most importantly) our 4 step process to get rid of it!
Understanding Tennis Elbow
Tennis elbow, a.k.a. the fancy terms lateral epicondylitis or lateral epicondylalgia, is a common condition that results in pain on the outer portion of your elbow. Despite its name, it is not unique to tennis players and can happen to anyone who repeatedly uses their forearm muscles. It’s quite common in tennis players because of how much they have to use their forearms to manipulate their racquets, but also very prevalent in people who weightlift, do a lot of yardwork or manual labor, or other activities that involve a lot of gripping and twisting with your hands. The most common culprit behind tennis elbow is overuse and strain on the tendons that connect the forearm muscles to the bony bump on the outside of the elbow.
Symptoms of Tennis Elbow
There are some characteristic symptoms of tennis elbow, so if you’re dealing with the condition, these should sound very familiar:
Pain (often aching or sharp) on the outside of the elbow, often right on that bony bump that we mentioned above.
Weakness in the affected arm, making it challenging to grip objects or perform normal tasks.
Nerve irritation can sometimes coincide with tennis elbow, which can lead to a “burning” type of pain that can extend farther down into the forearm, or feelings of numbness and/or tingling.
Physical Therapy for Tennis Elbow: The 4 Steps
Step 1: Is it REALLY Tennis Elbow?
It sounds simple, right? It hurts on the outside of your elbow, so it must be tennis elbow! Unfortunately, the body can be a little tricky sometimes. When someone comes into our clinic with a diagnosis (either a self-diagnosis or even one from their medical doctor) of tennis elbow, we always want to make sure the pain isn’t coming from somewhere else and masquerading as tennis elbow! The neck and shoulder can both have conditions that send pain down to the outside of the elbow, so our first step is ruling out those causes of pain. Once we’re confident from our examination that we do have true tennis elbow on our hands, we can move to step 2.
Step 2: How irritable is this elbow?
An important step in the process of deciding how to manage tennis elbow is determining how easy it is to flare the elbow up, or how “irritable” it is. If you only have pain after 30 minutes of yardwork or playing tennis, then the management of your tennis elbow is going to look a lot different than someone who tries to pick up a coffee cup and has to yelp in pain! Once we have a gauge on how irritable your tissues are, we can move towards treatment.
Step 3: Pain Management
There are a few treatments that we can provide in the clinic that help calm down a painful elbow. Joint mobilizations, dry needling, soft tissue mobilization, and isometric exercises can all be really useful in getting that pain and irritability down, so we can progress to the really important stuff - building strength in the elbow muscles and tendons. If you’re not familiar with any of those terms, that’s okay! They’re all just different treatments that we can do to the muscles, tendons, and joints in the area to help you feel better. Here is one simple thing that you can try at home for pain relief:
Step 4: Get Stronger!
After we help you get the pain to a tolerable level, we can move towards the real solution to tennis elbow: building up the strength in the muscles and tendons so that they can tolerate whatever you ask them to do! It would be great if we could cure the issue with some dry needling, a little massage, and some quick and easy exercises; but unfortunately, that’s just not the true and lasting fix for tennis elbow. You need to get those muscles working really hard, because appropriate tension in the muscles stimulates your body to strengthen the irritated tendons. You may also need to strengthen the surrounding muscles to see if the elbow is an unfortunate victim of weakness in the shoulder or stiffness at the wrist. In this scenario, the elbow has to work excessively hard to make up for issues in those surrounding areas. Despite this phase of rehab taking a lot of hard work, it’s the exciting phase! As you’re able to do harder and harder exercises, you will gain confidence that you’re on the right path; building up a resilient elbow that will be able to manage all you can throw at it on the court, in the garden, or in the weight room.
Conclusion
Tennis elbow is an incredibly frustrating condition and people often deal with it for a long time without seeking any help. There are plenty of “quick fix” solutions out there, but people usually don’t make it past those easy solutions to address the root of the problem. We hope you gained some clarity on how to truly recover from tennis elbow, as well as some motivation to not let it keep you from doing the things that you love for too long! Please reach out to us if you have any questions or if you need some help!
