TennisOne Advice

What to do about tennis elbow?

By John Yandell

Since tennis elbow is probably the most common tennis injury, and there's often not one cure for everyone, we are encouraging people who've had this unfortunate affliction to send in their stories and cures. We'll publish those that we feel are relevant to our general audience. To send in your tennis elbow story, email to: tenniselbow@tennisone.com.

The cure for me...

After many months of elbow pain and suffering I finally went to see a doctor who specializes in sports injuries. She explained many things but among the most important was that the reason many people suffer from tennis elbow is that they do not take 2-3 minutes to stretch that particular muscle.

It seems that the pain experienced is from the muscle located below the elbow on the top part of the arm. This muscle controls the movement of the wrist. In fact, if you hold that muscle while moving your wrist, you will feel it tensioning and relaxing. When you play hard, without stretching this muscle first, it tears away from the elbow where it is attached to the bone causing the dreaded tennis elbow pain. It needs to be stretched before playing. This is done by standing sideways near a wall. Hold out your arm at a 90 degree angle to the wall and place the back of your hand against the wall. Slowly push or lean against the wall with the back of your hand. You will feel this muscle stretch. After doing this exercise, this muscle should be stretched enough to be able to handle the rigors of tennis.

Note: You must also strengthen this muscle, when not playing, by doing exercises with weights and surgical rubber or Therabands. Also, hitting the ball earlier will help. If you are late in hitting the ball, this puts more pressure on the arm and elbow to bring the racquet around. You want to hit the ball earlier, anyways.

This works for me.... but no guarantees!

Good luck.