Tennis Elbow | Prevention Tips & How to Keep Your Elbows Healthy
No matter what sport or activity you participate in, or whether you are an athlete or not, tennis elbow can affect you. While the name implies that tennis players are at a higher risk, it’s a common overuse injury in many sports, such as CrossFit or weightlifting, and it’s often found in people who don’t even workout at all.
What is Tennis Elbow?
Repetitive use of the muscles and ligaments that surround the elbow creates conditions favorable to the onset of tennis elbow. Poor mechanics can also contribute, but the main cause is overuse. Tennis elbow is a form of tendonitis that results from microscopic tears in the tendons that surround the elbow. Over time, these strained tendons become thickened, bumpy, and irregular when they are not cared for properly. The over-stressed tendons cause pain on the outside of the elbow.
Causes
In the sport of tennis, improper technique and poor stroke mechanics can lead to tennis elbow. Working with a coach or instructor can help. However, anyone who engages in repetitive motion of the wrist or forearm to the point of overuse can experience tennis elbow. Some occupations that commonly lead to this overuse condition include painters, musicians, carpenters, and dentists.
Tennis Elbow Prevention
Rather than waiting until your elbow hurts, it’s smart to take a proactive approach to your arm health. Recovering muscles and tendons after repetitive activity will ensure your elbows are fresh and ready to take on stress again.
There are plenty of tools that can be used to recover the muscles around the elbow. Although foam rollers, massage guns, and compression boots can feel good, it’s important to know their place in recovery. Breaking down adhesions and “squeezing” the skin can help move some blood, but muscle activation is mandatory for pumping nutrients into the muscle and activating the lymphatic system to flush out waste. This movement of nutrients and waste is the foundation of recovery, and muscle activation is the only way to engage the system.
Active recovery is the best way to activate your muscles, but just be sure not to do too much. Doing too much activity will cause muscle fatigue, which is exactly what you don’t want to do. Doing too little active recovery won’t provide the desired results either. This delicate balance between causing fatigue and getting sufficient recovery is what makes the Marc Pro device a perfect complement to your routine.
Importance of Elbow Recovery
When your muscles are recovered, you can prevent overuse from developing and ensure you feel fresh for the next day’s activity. Enacting preventative measures now is less time consuming, less expensive, and less painful than having to partake in tennis elbow treatments down the road.
How to Use Marc Pro for Tennis Elbow Prevention
Marc Pro’s suggested pad placements are intended to provide starting points for using the device, but they don’t need to be exact as long as the problem area is being activated. For preventing tennis elbow, a good pad placement to start with is the Mid Arm or Single Whole Arm Focus placement. A quick 30-minute session with Marc Pro will provide much needed recovery to your elbow, which can easily be done while you are on the couch watching Netflix, working, traveling, and more.
Mid Arm
- Start with the provided pad placements, but feel free to move the pads to where your soreness is. For example, if you want to target the lateral elbow, move the pad to the lateral side of the forearm.
Single Whole Arm Focus
- This placement is great for targeting one arm at a time. Follow the pad placement as is or move the forearm pad on channel B so that it’s contracting where you’re sore.
Note: Free coaching calls are available to all Marc Pro customers, so you can get one-on-one personalized help for your specific issue.
Contractions on the muscles above and below your problem spot will help continue this fluid exchange of nutrients and waste throughout the body. For the last 40 years, tennis elbow has been a well-researched phenomenon. With today’s active lifestyle, this problem has become more prevalent and more applicable to the general population than ever before. If you’ve got a nagging issue in your elbow, chances are it could develop into tennis elbow. Take the steps now to fix it before it becomes a bigger issue.