Hi guys! In this video, I'm going to share some tips for anybody who does weightlifting or
CrossFit or activities like that who's suffering from elbow pain or niggles in the elbows, either
over the outside – tennis elbow type of pain – or the inside, which is more … golfer's elbow,
we call that. So, for those of you who don't know me, my name is Maryke. I'm one of the
physiotherapists from sports-injury-physio.com, where you can get online physiotherapy assessment
as well as treatment for your injuries. Have a look at the Description of this video if you
want a link to our website. Now, tennis elbow is basically an injury to the tendon of where
the wrist extensor muscles come and attach; their tendons come together, and they attach
on the outside of the elbow. Golfer's elbow is the opposite; it's where the muscles that flex
your wrist or help you grip … their tendons come together and attach on the inside of the elbow.
Now, tendons can be injured through either a chronic overload or an acute overload. Now,
acute overload is the easiest one, because it basically means you do a massive training session
that that tendon's not strong enough to handle. So, it's used to this level, suddenly you do that,
and then it flares up, and it's really painful the next day. A chronic overload is actually more
common for this type of injury, and it's where you chronically overload it by just a tiny bit,
but you're not giving the tendon enough recovery time to repair that overload,
so that eventually … it becomes a big injury. Because you've got to remember that when we train,
we get micro-damage in all parts of the body; so, your muscles, tendons, bones, everything.
And that's normal, because then the body repairs it, and you grow stronger through that.
But if you do not allow that repair phase to take properly place, the micro-trauma adds up,
and that's when you get these overuse injuries. So, the first thing for prevention of this is
to take note of what your body is telling you. If you're starting to get really tight forearms
and a bit of achiness every now and again in there, and it lasts for quite a while;
it doesn't really matter how much stretching or flexibility or massaging you do, it's not
really … it helps for a bit and then it comes back; that's a sign that those muscles and tendons
are being overworked and they're not being allowed to recover properly. So go and have a look;
if that's happening, have a look at your training schedule: What are you doing?
Is it that you're doing too many high-intensity training sessions? Have you actually been
pushing the intensity for too many weeks on end? Because remember, we need a pattern in our weekly
training, that you can't just push 52 weeks of the year; you've got to have like six to eight
weeks where you push, and then you've got to take a bit more of a recovery cycle, and then you can
push again a little bit. But even in that period, you need to have enough recovery days between
your hard sessions so that you can get the body to recover. Because if you're not recovering,
you're not going to get the training benefit; you're going to end up with injury.
So, that's the first step: if you're starting to get these niggles and that stiffness and tightness
doesn't want to go away, react to it and give it its recovery; see how you can change your
training up to help that. But now, what if you're already stuck with it? How do you get it better?
You will see, if you google it on the Internet, they all tell you about strength training and
stretching and all of those things. But if the tendons are really painful and you're going to try
and strengthen, it you're just going to make it worse, because remember, it's an overuse injury.
So, the thing you need to do … Same goes for stretching, because tendons that's
really aggravated do not take kindly to being stretched. So, be careful; if
you do do stretches, you have to feel better afterwards. You … What you could find is that,
actually, two, three hours later, you feel much worse. So, just keep an eye on that.
But the best treatment for this is relative rest combined with gradual loading. So, with relative
rest I mean that you just rest from the really aggravating activities. So, you don't have to
cut everything out, but there will be certain things you've got to cut out. So for instance,
bizarrely enough, although a golfer's elbow is more sensitive to grippy type things,
gripping weights can also still irritate the tennis elbow type pain, because it's an isometric
contraction of them. So, you may have to either go really light with your weights or cut it out
fully at the beginning. And it does need a period of offloading and rest to just calm the pain down.
But now, rest is brilliant at calming pain down, but it doesn't strengthen anything up.
So, even though the pain is gone after you've rested it, it won't be as strong as it was before,
and if you do regular training sessions, it will flare up again. So, what you've got to do then
is start very slowly and introduce light-weight training sessions and give it enough recovery
time in between. Now, what is a light training session? That's relative to what your body can
handle and how affected your tendon is. So, it's worth working with somebody just to figure out,
okay, where should you really start and how should you be planning this. But the take-home message
is: Prevention is always better than cure. So, take note of how your arms are feeling.
Do you feel you've got stiffness there that's just not going away?
It may mean you need to look at your recovery periods and things. And then, if you are injured,
you've got to take relative rest, that you remove the aggravating things – so, no pain allowed after
a training session or the 24 hours afterwards, otherwise it's not helping at that point – and
then, when you go back to training, you've got to start really easy and slowly increase
the weights again; but it should not cause any delayed response and pain. Excellent!
Let me know if you've got any questions. And if you need more help with injury, you can
always consult one of us via video call – link is in the Description of this video. Take care!