Tennis elbow is a miserable thing. Old Mother Hen can tell you - it's really painful and quite debilitating, and it can be the devil to get rid of.
Or at least it used to be. Now there's a quick fix all over the Internet, and because Old Mother Hen believes in getting down to business, here it is: buy this exercise band. Use it to do this exercise. Called the Tyler Twist, this exercise creates an eccentric contraction on the muscles. It really works.
You feel tennis elbow on the outside of the elbow, from the bony protuberance at the top down into the forearm. Gripping anything with your hand is painful. The injury itself hurts like bejesus if you press on it, which makes sense, since it is actually a tear of the tendon that attaches the muscles of the forearm to the elbow.
Doctors call tennis elbow lateral epicondylitis.
Old Mother Hen has had tennis elbow twice, left elbow (from hitting tons of golf balls but mostly the ground at the driving range after her father died) and right elbow (falling out of side plank doing hung-over yoga). (Never from tennis. Old Mother Hen has not played tennis since she was a young spring chicken at Duke in a different century.) (And never from overuse, even if it supposedly is an overuse injury. Sudden trauma - like repeatedly whacking the ground hard with a golf club - can do the job too.)
The first bout of tennis elbow lasted for six months or more. Waiting for it to get better did not work. A hand doctor had much useful advice on golf swing and grip, but nothing to say about fixing tennis elbow. He said it would go away after a while. It did not. (He also said titanium clubs would not have helped.) After another month of pain, I went to physical therapy. That consisted of weeks of hour-long sessions of cross-tissue massage (painful), TENS machines (painful and shocky), and ultrasound (just boring), plus numerous exercises with rubber tubing. This eventually did the job.
Fortunately the Internet evolves, so when OMH hurt her elbow in yoga class, the world brain was there to help. Also, you can buy all sorts of things online. A pressure band did little or nothing to improve the pain, though it looked awesome, but the Tyler Twist did the job.
