Understanding Tennis Elbow: Causes, Symptoms, and Effective Treatments

A common occurrence of pain at the elbow is on the sides of the elbow, over those bony points on the outside and inside of your arm.  Pain or tenderness, more specifically on the outside point (lateral epicondyle), could potentially be caused by a condition called lateral epicondylitis or more commonly known as “tennis elbow”. The pain can often be recreated when reaching out with a straight elbow, like putting clothes on the line or grabbing that item off the top shelf. It can also be caused by gripping tightly or performing resisted wrist extensions.  Tennis elbow is often caused when repetitive, forceful or sustained stresses have caused degeneration at the area where our muscles straighten our fingers or lift our wrist backwards.  This results in inflammation and pain around the area which can gradually increase in severity and become quite debilitating if not managed properly early on.

Initially the pain you experience is usually only temporary, potentially only when doing a repetitive task for a while and settling after you stop.  This progresses to being painful most of the time even when doing relatively light or easy tasks and settling when at rest after a while or overnight.  It can eventually get to the stage where the pain is constant even at rest, with severity increasing with activity.

This progression occurs as we are often unable to give our arms the initial rest / support they need, with further aggravation happening each day.  Because let’s face it, life doesn’t always give us the option of slowing down enough to look after ourselves well.

So how can we manage this?  The biggest barrier to recovery revolves around the activities in our lives that are causing the stress through the elbow and making changes to either our environment or how we approach the task and changes to our manual handling techniques.  Rarely can we avoid the offending activity completely, so sustainable changes that we can make initially are important to try and reduce the load through the elbow to avoid further aggravation.  This can be supported by doing regular massage to the forearm muscles that are often tight from the regular use, nerve glides to eliminate any nerve impingements, bracing to help protect the muscles, and graded strengthening exercises once the acute inflammation has settled.

It is important that strategies are put in place to help manage this condition as unfortunately these symptoms often last for months, making this a very frustrating situation to deal with.  Therefore, it is important to seek help from a therapist early to make sure this is managed as quickly as possible.