What's your experience with "Golfer's elbow"?

I've been attending my local gymnastics class now for 4 months once a week. I've also just started foundation and handstands my self. 

But the other day after doing some rope climbs and then next day lots of chin ups and pull ups my elbow felt sore on the inner side, so I saw the physio and it's "golfer's elbow". After some acupuncture, massage and some k-tape I've been told to rest it and do some light wrist curl negatives (palm down).

 

How have any of you found it?

What did you do to recover? and how long did it take?

Be careful with it, it gets chronic easily and can take a long time to recover from, 3-12 months even.
I guess that would depend on your body and on what kind of rehab you do. For now you should do nothing that increases the pain.

And see the barbell shrugged podcast with Coach, he talks about this specifically. The short version: You are attempting to do too high strength/volume stuff. Your body can't handle it at your current fitness level, so you need to back off and start with easier exercises to build up connective tissue strength. If you are following F series, you are probably not at that level of rope climb progressions yet, I would guess. So when the tendinitis clears up, stick to whatever level you are at and drop doing any accessory work like pullups etc.

Sounds like a case of the dumb-dumb.

Dont do that much work without recovery

Had similar issue. Went for massage, used K tape and took it easy for few weeks. It took a couple of months to heal almost completely but for me wasn't crazy painful so I kept training F1 just took it easy on RC for few weeks and haven't done pullups.

K tape helped incredibly, I couldn't believe it

I always recommend using voodoo bands for golfer's elbow. It helped cure mine and I've helped cure many of my rock climbing friends' elbows too.

Yeah voodoo helped me a bit too, but the only real cure imo is to stop aggravating it and let it rest off. But voodoo can be good rehab in the meanwhile, maybe speed it up.

I have a habit of using ice packs on joints after new ROM sessions, longer than normal sessions, even before any discomfort is felt. Also i will soak my joints in cold water showers for a few minutes as a preemptive strike, trying to go along with the college gymnast technique Coach mentioned of taking a 10 minute ice bath after each session. 

 

I would say waiting for pain to apply ice or icy/hot creams is poor practice when one could easily treat possible strain before feeling of it is felt. 

 

i agree with band work as a remedy, but also as a good habit for joint warm-up before ring work. i have been able to avoid elbow discomfort by doing 1 set of 10 reps of skull crushers with bands. 

 

Also, i wanted to add im not against overtraining sometimes to find out ones limits, i think its necessary in our training "careers" to find out how far we can go, then back down and train accordingly from there. Upon time well spent training wisely, we can then push once more close to that edge and see if we got stronger and can work regularly in that zone. Obviously im not agreeing with serious strains, tears or breaks, but just enough to be able to say "ok, i probably over did it with that last maneuver, will leave that one alone for a few weeks/months."

 

I think T.S Elliot sums that up nicely with his famous quote,

    "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. "

RJS said:

I have a habit of using ice packs on joints after new ROM sessions, longer than normal sessions, even before any discomfort is felt. Also i will soak my joints in cold water showers for a few minutes as a preemptive strike, trying to go along with the college gymnast technique Coach mentioned of taking a 10 minute ice bath after each session. 

 

I would say waiting for pain to apply ice or icy/hot creams is poor practice when one could easily treat possible strain before feeling of it is felt. 

 

i agree with band work as a remedy, but also as a good habit for joint warm-up before ring work. i have been able to avoid elbow discomfort by doing 1 set of 10 reps of skull crushers with bands. 

 

Also, i wanted to add im not against overtraining sometimes to find out ones limits, i think its necessary in our training "careers" to find out how far we can go, then back down and train accordingly from there. Upon time well spent training wisely, we can then push once more close to that edge and see if we got stronger and can work regularly in that zone. Obviously im not agreeing with serious strains, tears or breaks, but just enough to be able to say "ok, i probably over did it with that last maneuver, will leave that one alone for a few weeks/months."

 

I think T.S Elliot sums that up nicely with his famous quote,

    "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. "

Trouble is, how do you define limits? Your tendons do not snap at exactly a ten on a perceived exertion scale. They may snap well before that, or not at all. This kind of advice is really just a roll of a dice. It may look nice on paper, but once you experience that 'pop' sound, trust me, you wish you could go back and be more sensible. Old injuries never go away completely, so injury prevention should be at the top of everybody's list. Stick to the foundation schedule at a conservative pace, you'll still achieve your goals faster than those who wasted time being injured.

Ya Ravn i think your right. The level of intuition and awareness im used to is probably not common among fitness enthusiast's, but more so an advanced technique only learned after years of careful work. 

 

Well said my good man

Although, for those of you who know what im talking about, and have enough time and freedom in life to go above and beyond, what i said previously is correct.

Thank you all for your replies, it is slowly getting better and I'm doing what I can in F1 without using the elbow. I don't have a voodoo band, so k-tape and rest is it for now then. 

I think I will buy a voodoo band as they are cheap. How do you guys use it for golfer's elbow. I've watched and read a bit but thought I'd also as on here as well.

On another note, do you think it could have been lots of handstand practice that's brought it on? If I put my arm out straight and put my palm on a wall with fingers up, then push my fingers in to the wall I can feel it pull where the pain is. This is the same motion as if I were in a handstand and pushing fingers down to stop myself from falling over.

No, it's the pulling for sure. I used to rock climb a lot and would get terrible medial epicondylitis (golfers). It's brutal.
But you are feeling it in the handstand as well because you are flexing your fingers to dig into the ground for balance. But the forces from pullups, rope climb etc far exceeds the HS.

It's a while since I voodoed, probably Vincearoo knows better.
But I just used a pretty thin elastic band (dont need a dedicated V band) and wrapped it up my arm like a tourniquet, across the joint. Then you flex and move your elbow around, maybe even with some help. Kelly Starrett has some good videos and I think maybe EliteFTS does a well. There is an original video by someone other than Kelly, which is really good. Try digging that up, I think it was what "started" the Voodoo craze a while back.

Oh, and remember to stop when your hand goes tingly and white. You are blocking the blood flow, which is not a good thing to overdo. A little in this case is alright, as it is believed to somehow help with the healing (I think I recall), but a lot of ischaemia is bad. In the end, very bad. Probably talking less than 2 minutes here, but you'll feel it.

Kage summarizes it pretty well. Wrap a little above and below the elbow, as tight as possible, and move it in and out of flexion from various positions. If you feel it in handstands, I would wear the band during handstands and also while doing dead hangs.

I also combined it with sledgehammer rotations. Hold a sledge hammer in your hand with your elbow at your side bent at 90 degrees. Turn your hand with the sledgehammer to the left and to the right. Hold it closer to the head to make it easier and progressively move your hand down the shift as you get stronger.

I haven't used the voodoo band in a long time since I cured my medial epicondylitis, but I still sledgehammer everytime before climbing.

Edit.

Just noticed that the sledgehammer part might be confusing. I did not do that while wearing a voodoo band.

I've also been suffering from it, since about September last year. I posted a similar question to yourself and got some good advice back (https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/forum/topic/13041-elbow-pain-ouch/?view=findpost&p=127505) but I'm still experiencing the pain even now. It does seem to gradually be getting better but it's still there so I'm taking it easy with progressing. It seemed to come on after I advanced to HBP/PE2 and RC/PE3 so I went back to earlier progressions and built back up again. I'm still on RC/PE2 now even though I mastered it ages ago but I'm too scared to progress to RC3 in case it makes my elbow worse again.

 

I'm afraid it seems like it's one of those injuries that'll take ages to go away completely.

Some more brilliant advice, thanks. I've had tennis elbow before (couple of years ago) and that healed in a month and has never come back. My elbow has already stopped hurting during the day so maybe the k-tap and essentric wrist curls are working.

Jasper said:

I've also been suffering from it, since about September last year. I posted a similar question to yourself and got some good advice back (https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/forum/topic/13041-elbow-pain-ouch/?view=findpost&p=127505) but I'm still experiencing the pain even now. It does seem to gradually be getting better but it's still there so I'm taking it easy with progressing. It seemed to come on after I advanced to HBP/PE2 and RC/PE3 so I went back to earlier progressions and built back up again. I'm still on RC/PE2 now even though I mastered it ages ago but I'm too scared to progress to RC3 in case it makes my elbow worse again.

 

I'm afraid it seems like it's one of those injuries that'll take ages to go away completely.

Funny, I posted in that thread, too. Did you try the exercises I suggested? Did you add any of your own that also help?

Vincearoo. Yes I did try those suggestions in the early days (except for the sledgehammer, as I don't have one!). I kept at it with the Voodoo band daily for a while but it didn't seem to help. My elbow was so painful that I couldn't put any pressure on my hand, even pushing myself up from being seated on the floor was painful and I couldn't even pick my kids up without pain.

 

So, I stopped the rehab and stopped doing any of the pushing and pulling exercises in F1, even stopped with the headstands from H1 as they irritated it, and then after a couple of months I introduced the exercises all back into my routine at PE1 week 1.

 

I can still feel some discomfort in my elbow but it's a lot less than it was. As I'm sitting here typing right now I can't feel any pain in it. Which is a massive improvement to how it was at the end of last year.

Yeah, it's best to avoid that tendinitis altogether, it really slams the breaks on your training and can be avoided easily by staying within one's individual limits.

Second what Vince says about sledgehammer rotations. Those and Reverse wrist curls are pretty much the staple of what Eric Hörst prescribes in his legendary book for strength training to assist in climbing development. It might seem evident now, but was very eye-opening back then for a lot of people, I think. It's kind of like with shin splints, I think it's easier to avoid tendinitis if you have a more balanced strength development of the anterior and posterior muscle compartments.

I think to say that injuries can be 'avoided easily' really oversimplifies things and is rather patronising to those that have an injury.

 

In my own example I can certainly say that I didn't attempt to progress before I had fully mastered the previous element (some might even say that I stay longer than necessary on an element before moving on actually). There was really no lead up to my elbow pain. I wasn't working out through mild pain that progressively got worse over a period of time. One day there was no pain and I was doing the exercises within the limits of the schedule nicely, then the next time it was super painful.

 

It can be really hard to know if one is overtraining or not unless things go wrong. Especially when working to a program such as this one, without any supplementary exercise, and only moving on week to week when fully ready. In my case, I clearly did more than my delicate lickle tendon could manage, but I'm not sure how I could have known that in advance.

 

That said... I might go and buy a sledgehammer this week.

Kage's mention of Eric Hörst took me to http://www.nicros.com/training/articles/treating-climbers-elbow/

In my search for advice on the internet I've only searched for Golfers Elbow rather than Climbers Elbow so had never seen this before. There looks like there's some good advice and rehabilitative exercises detailed.

K tape can help BUT do not use it for more then 3-4 months.

The funny thing about this conversation is that after months of pain free I start to feel something again in my elbows. Hopefully is just regular discomfort due to training...

It must be something to do with thinking about it cos mine is pretty painful today too!

Thought I would post my experience. I've never received golfer's elbow from foundation, but I am an enthusiastic boulder since before I started foundation. My case may be different than others, but it was diagnosed as golfer's elbow. The sledgehammer exercise that people have mentioned was useful, although I used a filled up water bottle and just performed the exercise at my desk. The main key for me though was stretching all the time. I would stretch every hour, and eventually I healed up. Closed fist, stretch wrist forward, backward, then rotate. Open hand, fingers stretched straight, stretch wrist forward, backward, then rotate. These stretches are exactly the stretches that are in the article Jasper shared.

 

The reason I suggest that my case is different, is because I haven't seen anyone mention a key symptom I had. Exercise actually helped the pain tremendously. It got so bad that I couldn't do a push-up on my knees. Just too painful. But after 30 minutes of climbing I was pain-free. If I took a few rest days without stretching the pain would come back much worse. I actually went on a vacation where I climbed for 2 weeks straight, and I stretched all the time. 10+ times a day at least. Totally pain free, and by the end of the trip I didn't have any problems. I've kept up the stretching, at least every other day, and I haven't had any problems since.