Last year I developed a terrible case of tennis elbow.
On the day of its initial onset, I woke up feeling fine. But by the afternoon, it felt like electric shocks were surging through my right forearm, just below the elbow. It’s a hard feeling to describe, but it’s painful.
I started to do some tennis elbow rehab exercises that I found on YouTube, but they didn’t seem to help. I had to take a break from my weightlifting for a few weeks and found daily maintenance activities painful to perform. I was super bummed.
About a month later, I woke up with the exact same feeling in my left arm! I now had tennis elbow in both arms. Bogus!
I finally decided to go to a physical therapist to see what they recommended and connected with Cord DeMoss at Vitality Therapy here in Tulsa.
Thanks to his coaching and treatment, I was finally able to heal my tennis elbow. It took a long time, though. My tennis elbow started in September 2021. It wasn’t until April 2022 that I could finally say all the pain from my tennis elbow was gone. That’s eight months.
Based on my experience with tennis elbow, I’ve concluded that it’s one of the dumbest injuries that can befall you.
It can be debilitating. I couldn’t pick up heavy things for several months. Shaking hands with people would cause a shock of pain to pulse down my arm. Opening doors was painful. Even picking up a cup made me wince.
And it takes forever to heal because it’s a tendon injury and tendon injuries are a booger to treat.
D – u – m – b. Dumb.
For those of you who are currently suffering from or may one day suffer from this dumb malady, I present to you the rehab protocol I used to heal it.
It worked for my case of tennis elbow. Maybe it will give you some ideas on how to treat yours.
What Is Tennis Elbow?
The scientific name for tennis elbow is lateral epicondylitis. It’s a tendinopathy (tendon injury) of the extensor tendons on the outside of your elbow. It’s not tendonitis or simple inflammation of the tendon. You can treat tendonitis in a few days or weeks with some rest and Advil.
When you have tennis elbow, the tendon tissue is damaged. It’s breaking down. It’s caused by the repetitive contraction of the forearm muscles that you use to straighten and raise your hand and wrist.
While it’s called tennis elbow because tennis players often get it, it can happen to anyone, like, for example, middle-aged bloggers/podcasters who powerlift recreationally. If you do something that causes the repeated contraction of your forearm muscles, you’re at risk of developing tennis elbow. Painting, driving screws, and using a computer mouse a lot can cause tennis elbow. I think mine came in part from how I was sitting at my desk.
You’ll usually experience the pain of tennis elbow where your forearm tendons attach to the outside of your elbow. In severe cases, you can have…
