Why Rest Isn't Fixing Your Elbow Pain (3 Exercises That Help)

In today's video, we're going to be looking at exercises to help get rid of elbow tendon pain. So, if you've got pain on the inside of your elbow or on the outside of the elbow, I'm going to show exercises that can help. If you're new to my channel, my name's Dr. Tom Walters and I'm an orthopedic physical therapist. So, again, in today's video, we're going to look at the best exercises for treating medial or inner elbow pain related to the tendons here that attach on our medial epicondyle, as well as exercises for our lateral tendons, which attach on the outside of the elbow. Usually, these conditions are called tennis elbow, which refers to again to pain on the outside of the elbow, and golfer's elbow. Now, you can have these tendon issues even if you don't play tennis or golf. And when we look at the research, the exercises that have the best evidence are going to be exercises in which we gradually load the tendons. So, really, these are strengthening exercises. And when we think about the muscles that attach here, the tendons that attach here, it's really going to be our wrist flexors, which bring our wrist up this way, our wrist extensors, and then our pronator and supinator muscles, the muscles that rotate our forearm for- forearm. And then the last one is grip strength. So, our finger flexors, which squeeze our hand, also attach up here on the inside of the elbow. So, we're going to I'm going to show exercises to target those muscles. When we strengthen those muscles, it'll put tension on their tendons, and when we see what we see in the research is that when we load the tendon, it helps to reduce pain. So, let's go ahead and get in the first one. To strengthen these

muscles, you're either going to need a set of dumbbells somewhere between 1 to 5 lb in most cases. You want to find a resistance that's challenging but doesn't create more than mild discomfort. So, about a three or four out of 10. So, you can do all these exercises with dumbbells. I've also got a new tool that I'm going to show today that I found called the Tornado that allows you to strengthen all of your grip and forearm muscles with one tool. So, I'll show you that later on in the video. So, for the first two exercises, we're going to use our dumbbell and we're going to work our wrist flexors, which is going to target the tendon on the inside of the elbow, and then our wrist extensors, which will target the tendons on the outside of the elbow. What you're going to do here is take your dumbbell and start with your palm up and your wrist hanging off the edge of a table. You're going to hold the dumbbell and you're going to go through full range of motion allowing your wrist to drop all the way down into extension and then coming all the way up into flexion. That movement again is going to strengthen our wrist flexors and even though they're called wrist muscles, the wrist flexors, their upper tendon attaches right here on the inside of the elbow and is one of the primary tendons involved in inner elbow pain or again called golfer's elbow in most cases. So, for all these exercises, you're going to think about doing three sets of around 15 repetitions and just moving through the motion nice and slow. So, we've got an eccentric contraction on the way down and then a concentric up. Okay, so that's for the wrist flexors. To do the wrist extensors, you're just going to flip over. So, now I'm palm down and I'm going to do the exact same thing. So, I'm going to go through full range of motion now working the wrist extensors on the top side of the forearm and their tendons go out there to the outside of the elbow. So, you just pick the exercises in this video that apply to the type of pain you have, whether it's pain on the outside of the elbow or pain on the inside of the elbow. Okay, so those are our first two. We have a wrist extensor curl and a wrist flexor curl. For the next two movements

we're going to strengthen our pronator muscles, which run on this side of the forearm and attach on the inside of the elbow, and our supinator muscle, which runs up and attaches on the outside of the elbow. You're going to use your dumbbell again. This time instead of holding in the kind of normal grip position, you're going to hold at the end of the dumbbell. Again, wrist kind of hanging off the edge of the table and then I'm going to slowly rotate the dumbbell having all the weight like this out towards the end creates this kind of challenging lever. So, right now I'm strengthening my pronator muscles. This is an eccentric contraction and then I'm going to contract concentrically to bring the weight back up to vertical. Now when the weight goes the other direction my supinator muscle is going to contract eccentrically right here and then it's going to contract concentrically to bring the weight back to vertical. So this is a nice one because you just essentially go from side to side and you work both sides of the forearm even if you only have pain on you know one part of your elbow. I would do this movement through both directions. Go through all of these if you can because not only will it help treat your painful area but it will also help protect the other side of the elbow and those tendons as well. So the same thing think about three sets of 15 repetitions working through that full movement to target the pronator muscles and the supinator muscles. Okay, so that's our second exercise. All right

now if you don't have dumbbells this is a new tool that I have found it's called the tornado. What's cool about this is you can do all of the movements of the wrist. You can challenge your grip strength, you know, supination, pronation, flexion, extension, even ulnar and radial deviation which I didn't show with the dumbbell and this thing is fully adjustable so you'd tighten these rings and you can change how much resistance this is providing. And then what you can do is you can go through all of the same exercises. So you can start going through extension and flexion like I was doing a second ago. And the nice thing here is you're getting both arms at the same time. So I've got the resistance turned up to the appropriate level for me so I can go back and forth like this, work my flexors and extensors. I can spin it upright and work my I can work my pronators and supinators by kind of going side to side like that. has this cool kind of tornado motion you can do so you can work all of those planes of motion at the wrist getting all the movements at one time. I can work ulnar deviation and radial deviation going back and forth like this. It's kind of like this gear shifter that provides resistance and they have all kinds of workouts you can do on their page and kind of take it and go through like this back and forth. It's really a pretty cool all-in-one device for strengthening your wrist and forearm muscles. So, if you don't have dumbbells or maybe you do and you want a tool that allows you to just kind of do all of it in one place, this again is called the tornado. I'll put a link for it down the description if you want to check it out. Okay, so those are the best exercises for treating inner and outer tendon pain at the elbow. You're thinking about those rotational movements and then flexion extension. So, give those a try. If you have any questions, put them down in the comment section. Thanks for checking out today's

video. I hope you find these exercises to be helpful. If you need a more comprehensive program for either inner or outer elbow tendon pain, I'd encourage you to check out my book. In the elbow chapter, you'll find both a tennis elbow and a golfer's elbow program in chapter 17 here the elbow chapter. So, these programs start on page 235. All the programs take you through three phases and have pictures of me doing the exercises so you can kind of just flip through and do your own rehab at home. All the movements I covered in today's video are also in this program and then on page 243 is the golfer's elbow program. So, the book is a great DIY resource. If you want uh programs in video form, I also have an app that you can find in the app store. It's called rehab science and it also is organized by body regions. If you scroll down here to the elbow section, you'll find the tennis elbow program and the golfer's elbow program. If you click into those, it will also walk you through three phases of rehab, but the exercises are all in video form. So, you've got that. You've got all the programs for the entire body. The other cool thing is there's a community feature so you can check out all the things that I post. You can also direct message me and then once a month I do office hours on Zoom so you can come in, join a Zoom session and ask me your own individual questions. If you want to check out either of these resources, I will put links for them down in the description. Thanks again for watching today's video. I'll see you in the next one. Bye.