Elbow Pain Exercises: Quick Ways to Reduce Your Client’s Elbow Pain
To watch the full video, click here: https://youtu.be/EWupjPx_PC4
Hey coaches athletes what’s happened at Michael Hughes here with Gymanzo Edu diving into another installment in our series on tweakology, this time going after the good old fashioned elbow, gotta give a lot of thanks to great Institute for helping me understand and invent the word tweak ology for us to dive into and give it to you trainers and conditioners. So we’re gonna be covering in this video, the anatomy, the muscles, the bones, the connective tissue of this joint right here, and also the common dysfunctions and the exercises that go with those dysfunctions typically in a training and conditioning setting. And what do we do and how what you can do to tweak it to make sure that elbow is singing some praises as we get through a workout. Now, there’s a revolutionary process happening in the fitness and athletic industry. And it’s being fueled from the knowledge that in the past has been held by those who could who only had a six figure graduate degree. But even then, that knowledge was vastly incomplete in its application. So it is Ross’s edu goal to share knowledge and therefore enable a greater capability to those individuals who have the most amount of power and influence to positively help as many and the greatest number of people as possible. Those are the movement trainers of the world. But we can’t do that, unless we know enough about how and why the human body functions the way it does, not just from a textbook or traditional education, but from the multitude of methodologies that are rooted in the principles of physics, biological and Behavioral Sciences, or the applied functional sciences. It is then when we move in trainers can fill that gap and then we can help out the greater healthcare system. So that the series just be a little drip a little bit knowledge, little something to get you going on how you can take this information and give it to the people that really needs it. That’s the greater general population, because then we can help any person who comes through our doors to help them and live a better and better life. So if you like this, if you’d like this revolution, hit that like button for us. So this content is shared with more and more people. If you want to join this revolution, or certainly start by hitting the subscribe button. You can also apply to our MDMC mentorship. And certainly check this out that link in the description below. But let’s dive into the anatomy of the elbow. What are the major players? What are the bones involved? Well, no questions got the humerus, wider, but right above this thing, you have the electron right down here, that’s kind of like the knee cap of the elbow. Right? You have the radius in the old running drive down down here. It’s very similar to how the femur, knee and TIB fib work. It’s I mean, the structures are, I don’t want to call the word identical, but it’s super close to bones by little cap, and a giant with a big bone to bones, a little cap and then a big bone. I mean, it kind of just, it’s a good design. How about that? What about the muscles? What were the connective tissues that pulled this sucker together? Well, there’s like 30, maybe a little bit more that directly influenced the elbow, we’ll just start real quickly, right got the two on bicep, hence, whereby you have the three on the tricep, hence the word tricep, right. But then you have the deeper muscles that are connected to that humerus in that same same zone. Can’t forget about going up though, right, the deltoid, all the shoulder complex, they directly influence the elbow, that latissimus dorsi that directly connected to the humerus. So that’s going to affect the elbow. And then the big pot, right, the big players, all these four muscles with about 20 of them that are on this top and bottom side. And that’s a lot. And there’s a lot going on here. Well, we’ll dive into this more what makes this hand do what it can do so magically, in function, there’s a lot of biomechanics. To go with this, I’m gonna do a bit of a deeper dive than I’ve typically done, because I want you to understand this elbow has a lot of problems that can come to it. But it’s first, primarily what we see is flexion and extension, right? That’s its primary goal. But there’s a lot to do. And to be said about the transverse plane was supination and pronation. Now, because this is an open chain joint, in most cases, like 99% of the time, we have to understand what it’s like to have rotation happen through it, right, that little pattern right right right there. Because it’s really influenced by the wrist and by the shoulder scapula complex, just like the knee is affected by the ankle foot and this hip complex, but it’s a little different. It’s a little different because our knee operates most commonly in a closed chain, or what I mean by that is the foot is in touch with the ground, it’s affixed to something or art or elbow. It’s open chain, just to keep it simple, right? It’s not affixed to anything it certainly can be affixed to something push up. We’ll talk about that later, but operates in a flow state much more than are needed. So just something to understand there. Now I’m gonna dive into a little bit more because the common dysfunctions was the biggest two that people talk about are golf and tennis. elbow, you know, so as long as that medial, lateral epicondylitis, essentially, you know, a little bit of tension, right tendinitis, same kind of thing. So if we understand that the elbow isn’t a long chain of joints, right, from literally from our foot, all the way up into our wrist, so it’s kind of at the end of that chain. And when we’re talking about these two common dysfunctions, we have to understand where Can this really come from, because I’m gonna start talking about tweaks later on, with more common exercises, and I want you to get the broadest picture first. So you can understand that a little bit of tweaks and why I’m doing those, those things and why to work so well in our training and conditioning for our hundreds and our 1000s of clients that have come through us over the years. So if this elbow becomes too mobile, right, if it moves too much, just like the neath the knee moves too much. It doesn’t like it, the elbow doesn’t like it’s designed to be a stable joint between a relatively very mobile or very capable in 3d movement, wrist, and super capable humerus in the glenohumeral. joint. So it’s very important that we have some stability between these two kind of crazy guys, right down here and up and up there. But let’s talk about the biomechanics of pitching. Right. So pitching is a very common sport, especially in America are throwing, right, it’s very football, baseball to the, to the big sports, you know, even shooting a basketball is essentially throwing, right, so in this, this motion, and in this motion, we’ll say that’s baseball and football, we have to understand what’s going on. Now, there’s two types of pain that can happen. One is on pain of release on the throw at the elbow, and one is on when we start to load back and begin to throw. So let’s talk about the first one, if there’s pain in the release, we have to understand that when we throw our foot stops, first, baseball, football, even basketball, right, we hit a stop point, right, or we’ll jump in and and do some sort of throw. But you know, the case is there’s power that’s happening from the foot up on in and as from a baseball throw, we pitch and we come through like ooh, pain, right? When I release, the chain reaction of deceleration started way down here, foot into the hip, into the thoracic spine winding its way around in a in a in a rotational actually in a not irritation, but in a diagonal process from my left hip, to my right shoulder coming through. So the deceleration that brake pedal motion has already started. And if it doesn’t do a good enough job through the series of hundreds of muscles, wrapping around to my backside into my, into my arm, if it doesn’t do a good job, and there’s going to be on that release point that brake has to run into the elbow. And that’s gonna be a big, big, big, big problem.
So just understand that concept of when there’s pain with throwing a common dysfunction is tennis or golf, right? Tennis as we come kind of through this kind of backhand field, boom, right and golf as we come this way, and come into there. It’s the same concept, but it’s much easier to see from a throwing right ashes scenario. And they’re also the same is true if we’re loading up to throw, and we’re here and we haven’t released yet. And there’s pain on the on the on the common through ball still in our hand, what’s the same thing, it’s just from an anterior portion. Because as we step, this adductor needs to accelerate, it actually contracts and pulls my pelvis in my core coming across in that diagonal fascial line needs to come through and basically flex in my chest, it needs to flex my deltoids a flex, even through a bit of my of my deep rotator cuff muscles they need to flex, or II centrically should be concentrically explode. If they don’t do a good enough job, then this arm and all the muscles that connect deep into that kind of medial elbow, they’re going to have to flex more contract is when we buy flex more. And that could pull on that tendon a little bit too hard and overtime, boom, there’s that pain as our windup comes through. So I briefly want to take some time to cover that to see the chain reaction biomechanics of what could happen, right just could in a throat positioning and how it all attaches to the elbow, but has nothing to do with the elbow. It’s just the last guy that’s getting picked on. So a bit of time on that one a bit of a, you know, kind of segue, but let’s go back back to it. Because we need to understand about some more things at least in fitness. Right? What about throwing a medicine ball let’s grab on medicine ball here. And let’s say I’m going to be kind of throwing this thing this is a common thing that happens in training facilities. As I’m thrown that medicine ball against the wall what what tweaks can I offer to take away what I just spoke about in those common elbow type pains tennis elbow, golf, elbow or medial or lateral epicondylitis in a sense, that’s when it gets to a crazy point, just pain in the elbow. You just medial pain. So think about if I’m throwing a ball and rotate Question, right? Well, I can certainly change my positioning, right? If that’s I don’t have enough power from the pelvis as it’s throwing up into my elbow, what if I change my position to forward facing, now I can kind of wind up and maybe use my hip a little bit more aggressively and do a push motion versus a throw motion, there’s an idea, right? Maybe my pain, I can get a little bit more energy. If I go from a low position, and do more of an underhand and throw more of a diagonal, up position. That’s, that’s really possible. And of course, I can do the same. Same thing, as I wind up, I can wind up more at shoulder height, and go down low and throw it throw it a downward angle, those may seem like simple, just angulation changes, but they change the muscles and the connective tissue that are involved to incorporate more friends. That’s what we want to do about the elbow want to bring more friends, more muscle groups to the party. So in a workout, you’re not disrupted by some elbow pain, you can keep going through that, without needing to solve and stop the workout to solve the pain, you can work yourself around it just for the time being, that’s really important. If you’re a coach, or an athlete, you just got to get the workout done. But you don’t want to destroy yourself through the process. So that’s a big, big, big, big piece there. What about the lower body tweaks in throwing or rotating or swinging, right? This could be with a cable machine, I’m just used to using an actual medicine ball, I instead of just a static foot position, I can do a step that adds more acceleration that brings more friends to the party, I could do a step rotation throw, right? With this one, I could do a step, or a step, or a load and a step, throw again, all those things add more potential more movement potential into now you’re gonna say, Gosh, that really takes away from the focus on the core. What with all tweaks, there’s always going to be a trade off, right? You ask any engineering student, any engineer, there’s no such thing as a perfect compromise, right? It’s just not in the Word, you have to always steal from one to give to another. And the body is just engineering in biological form. So it’s really important that we understand we’re always gonna have to steal from something to make it happen. We always want to avoid pain in a workout training conditioning environment, because you’re destroying something that you’re trying to build build up. What about push ups, one of the most common things that we can do in fitness that affects the elbow directly? Well, if you’ve seen a lot of our other videos in the series, you see that we do a lot of hand position changes. So if I’m going to push up, and I’m getting down low, and I feel a little bit of pain on my way down, right, when that elbow bends as an example, or on the way up? Well, the thing that we’ll do is we understand that we have six different hand positions that we can go into. To make this pushup different ones I commonly start with first is just hand position out or hand position in. Because that change is a big fraction of how this elbow works, because the elbow works in a push up. And much of like how a corkscrew works, just as a, as a wine corkscrew, maybe opens up a wine bottle, right? It spirals in, our leg does that when it loads, so does our arm. So if I can, if I can change my pre positioning of my rotation of my elbow, a little bit here a little bit there, I’m gonna give myself more room to play to maybe not put as much stress on the elbow on my way down on my way up. But I also have other options, I could put my right hand in front of my left, my left hand in front of my right, wide, narrow, and then even do a combination of maybe right in front with a little bit of fingered open, right, let’s try give that a shot. Me that makes it worse. Let’s try the opposite way. Wow, actually, that was a harder push up. But it didn’t hurt my elbow. Alright, so we can also decrease load. Right? Instead of going from from the toes, we can go from the knees, nothing wrong about changing load. Most of us in fitness or coaches, we push people too far too fast. Right? We don’t want to give him enough time to develop the necessary strength and repetition and the duration to sustain that workload. So something to consider as well. And then lastly, the part about push ups is that, you know, we do so many repetitions, right? Giving it enough of a rest between sets between workout days to let the connective tissue heal. So a lot of times it’s just we’re just overdoing it in a very healthy way. Just not giving enough time. I like to think about it. Go to the lake, summertime, you get a sunburn. Dang it no big deal. But you just go to the liquor again the next day, and you overdo it again and then the next day and then overdo it again. And then those small little sunburn starts to add up and you’re like, you had a long three day weekend at the lake you like, Hey, I am roasted and not a big event, just small, little sunburns throughout the time. So that’s kind of how push ups can affect the elbow as well. Just give them time to rest and recover. What about the opposite of a push up? What happens when you do rows? Right some sort of row some sort of pull down a pie or pull up right A lot of these are very similar to the push up. Second, we got to first see like, are we overdoing it on the volume? Is that an honest question that you’re asking yourself as an athlete or yourself as a coach to other athletes? What’s your volume? Like? is are these muscles especially if you’re a keyboarder? Right, someone who works that Dustin does keeps, or does anything like that? Yeah, that’s that’s a lot of action, many micro muscle contractions 1000s, perhaps if not way more than that, as the week progresses, how’s that affecting them in their workouts. So we can change a few things, right, we can change our angulation if it just a straightforward row, you can change where that row comes from, maybe I’m still standing right at you. But the cables offset slightly, while the cables offset slightly 45 degrees to my left. Now I have to change my row. Instead of coming right at me, my whole thoracic spine and pelvis has to change and relations, which loads this glute. More Watts loads my lat more and I can get more of a rotational pool. And even though my body centered at zero degrees, my my cables set off 45, I get more friends to the party, I’m gonna say that more and more often, to decrease elbow pain in a workout, bring more friends to the party bring more muscle and more connected to to the party. If my left legs in front, and I rotate to my left, that’s the same side internal hip rotation, I’m going to load that that glute more in the transverse plane, my glute says, I’m here, show me something. I gotcha. And it’s going to allow more power through that row as an example. And then the biggest thing that I like to do with any sort of ro and elbow pain, or pull up pull ups is add more of a driver from other body parts. So what I’ll do is, instead of just an isolated elbow row, I’ll say how about the pelvis pulls first, right, so I’ll get a kind of a view from it, as I’m pulling, I’ll have the pelvis basically rotate, first trunk rotate, just to have a second behind that one. And then I already have momentum built up some elbow to pull last, you know, it takes away from the isolation. But again, you gotta think about what’s more important, right? Can you get that drive, or just want strict elbow, I would venture for the first one would be much better, not only for your longevity of your shoulder and elbow, but also for the functionality of why you’re doing that row in the first place. And then when it comes down to it, the grip, right, your forearm muscles, maybe just be so bound down, there’s so much tension built up within that fascial network, that just grabbing the bar shoots a pain to the elbow, right, so we have to understand that there’s there’s some things that just we’re just to bound down through this network of 20 plus muscles. So the first thing that we can do just in our work is change our grip. Instead of being this kind of grip, we can turn our grip to there or change our grip to there or flat or changing the angulation because as I rotate more, certain muscles are going to have more tension on him. As they rotate the other way, other muscles have more tension on him. And if you can slip through that tension network and kind of sneak past it without overdoing that particular set of muscles that are overly or hyper toned, right, then you can slip through the workout without the elbow pain, sometimes it’s just too vast. So going through there and really changing how the tension is foam rolling, soft tissue work stretching, some basic things. Again, we’re not going to talk about in the workout, we’re not going necessarily in the workout. But things to consider if you’re in the workout. And that’s the you can’t carry stuff we do often we’ll do just a kind of a carry type of feel a log carry quote unquote, if we’re you know, typically we’re doing like a fireman’s carry. And we can’t do that because the grip hurts, we’ll just view it and just hug it here. So now my wrists are off. And I can just walk, do my drills, etc, etc. So that’s one thing to consider. And then this is the next thing depending on the tools that you have available, we call this a torque strap. And this allows us to take our body wined up a strap around ourselves. And now we can go through throwing, pulling all the body biomechanics that would make our elbow function to our body and remove the hand remove the arm, a lot of deep core training so we can go through a punching pattern, right? If I changed my body angulation or my hand I can go through a rowing pattern. If I continue to rotate into it like 270 degrees and go through a rotational pattern, and you’ll see that I’m pulling that bungee cord through my core, hands aren’t even connected, elbows not going to feel any any pain, because it’s not doing anything but I’m still getting the major muscle groups to get trained and conditioned effectively. And therefore progress me as an athlete or progress your athletes as your own coach. So I hope this video gave you a greater understanding and some insight and how you can start to think about your coaching and training sessions. For all the movement practitioners and even those those athletes are the kind of di wires
we need to start thinking about the disc function of the body, not necessarily where it is like Where’s it coming from. So that’s a big, big piece of hope you get out of this. But also, just to make your training and conditioning in real time, happen much more smoothly. So if you want to check out another installment of our tweak ology series, we’re going to cover the wrist next. And if you want even more content on Gymnazo Edu, please follow Gymnazo Edu on Instagram. You can check out our podcast as well. If you want to follow me, Michael Hughes on that 3d underscore athlete on Instagram and we will see you all next time.
Leave a Reply