Golfers Elbow Exercises
As a boxing coach, everyday I have someone on the pads with me, that means there is a lot of pressure being absorbed on the elbows. As someone who hurt his elbow weight training many years ago, holding the pads has gradually bought out the pain again so how to treat golfers elbow became a question I had to get answered.
What is Golfers Elbow?
Golfer’s elbow is a condition that causes pain where the tendons of your forearm muscles attach to the bony bump on the inside of your elbow. The pain might spread into your forearm and wrist. Golfer’s elbow is similar to tennis elbow, which occurs on the outside of the elbow. It’s not limited to golfers. (From MayoClinic)
From a boxing coach standpoint, there are some factors which can aggravate the injury, I found changing the boxing pads I was using also suddenly helped set it off. You’ll want to make sure the pads you use are not overly hard, try to get pads which are a little softer as this helps to cushion the blow and absorb some of the power from the punches. I find myself going back to using an older pair of pads which have been ‘broken in’ than rather than using a brand new pair of boxing pads. I do also wear an elbow support when holding the pads to give me extra support.
Keep exercising, this doesn’t mean going heavy on the weights, light exercises such as resistance bands are useful without causing any further pain. If you stop exercising you are failing to hit the root cause of the issue and risk the golfers elbow becoming worse, you need to exercise so that the tendons are still being worked upon and gradually getting stronger.
I am not a huge fan of using various creams/gels to relieve the pain of golfers elbow. It really just covers the issue and I never really found that the effects were noticeable anyway – it might treat the pain of golfers elbow for a very short amount of time but waking up in the morning and the elbow was always feeling tender again. The best bet is to work on strengthening the tendons of the elbow, this has been a much better route for me and my elbow has been slowly improving whilst using the exercise shown in the video below. This is an exercise I would recommend doing before you do any work which might effect the elbow. I tend to do around 30 reps per elbow, I have the pain in my left elbow but I work my right side as well because although there isn’t any pain in my right elbow, prevention is certainly better than cure so it is a good idea to work both sides and to even them up. I usually do 3 sets of 10 but sometimes I do also break it down further into sets of 5, both work and sometimes I will go up to 40 or even 50 reps. I do these every time I am at the gym which is every day. Check out the video below on how to do this exercise and I hope this helps treat your golfers elbow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH4P7bIORoM
