What Can You Do to Prevent Golfer’s Elbow?

Golfer’s elbow, also known as medial epicondylitis, describes an injury to the tendons on the inside of your elbow. Although this injury is common in golfers, as the name suggests, video gaming, resistance training and any other activities involving repetitive wrist and hand movements can cause golfer’s elbow.

This kind of pain can take weeks to disappear entirely, and rest is the best way to cure it. However, if you want to avoid getting golfer’s elbow, consider these steps to help prevent you from developing it in the first place.

Stretch

Before you work on strengthening your arms, it’s important to stretch. Stretching helps get your blood flowing and raises your muscle temperature, allowing more flexibility during your workout. Otherwise, you risk injuring yourself instead of building your strength. If you’re already injured, you can hurt yourself even further. We recommend trying basic hand and wrist stretches before moving onto strengthening exercises, such as:

• Repeatedly making a fist.
• Opening and closing your fingers, or abduction and adduction of your fingers.
• Wrist flexions and extensions, using as much range of motion as possible.

Strengthen

Strengthening the muscles in your arms, wrists and hands is the best thing you can do to prevent a case of golfer’s elbow in the future. As with any part of your body, the more you use your forearms and help them build muscle, the more you’ll be able to do on a daily basis without risk of injury. These exercises are some of the best to help you gain strength in your forearms, wrists, hands and fingers:

• Lateral wrist extensions.
• Seated dumbbell wrist curls and reverse wrist curls.
• Finger curls.

For these exercises, you’ll need a dumbbell. While the weight of the dumbbell depends on your body and strength level, it should generally be between five and 20 pounds.

Stop

Finally, if you start to experience pain while exercising, stop! Take time to let yourself rest and recover. If you must continue with your exercises, try to slow down or find an easier variation that doesn’t cause you pain.

Get in Touch With OrthoBethesda

If you’re seeking professional help to treat your golfer’s elbow, contact the team at OrthoBethesda. Our experienced physicians are ready to treat your pain with a variety of available services. Set up your appointment today to get started. Reach out to us online or call 301-530-1010 to learn more.