Structural Bodywork to Eliminate 'Tennis Elbow'
Spaghetti, Hammers and Tennis Elbow – How to Heal the Pain and Get Back to Work and Play 
Why they call it “tennis elbow” I don’t know. Most of the patients I see get this unique form of tendonitis from more mundane tasks such as hammering or stirring pot after pot of spaghetti.
Tennis elbow is really a repetitive-strain injury at the “end point” of a larger strain that began in some other part of the body. Sound confusing?
Here’s how it works. One autumn Saturday morning, you’re doing some backyard work – work of the raking, shoveling, nailing-things-back-in-place nature. You spend the morning raking leaves and pine cones, bent over, pulling the rake toward you, lifting it up, turning, dropping in a new spot, pulling again, etc. After a couple of hours, you get your piles in order and pull your “green” garbage can over, deftly scoop the leaves with your rake and drop them in the can. By the end of you third or fourth pile, you’re feeling that tired, weak, somewhat pleasant feeling in your biceps, forearms, low back and gluteus maximus.
So, perhaps you take a lunch break for an hour to relax, refresh and admire your work.
But the weekend doesn’t last long, and there’s more work to do. For one, the fence boards are coming loose in places and a couple of the posts can use some proper finish work. So you hoist your already-tired body out of your chasse lounge and pick up a hammer. You drum in a few new nails here and there, cut some 2X4s and tack them onto 10 or so posts. Before you know it, it is 4:00 in the afternoon, you’re back is sore and your hammering arm is really tired. But you keep going because you have just three more posts to finish.
You raise your hammer and feel a pain around your elbow. Not sharp pain, but raw pain, like a good scrap on an uneven surface. “I’m just tired,” you think. And finish off the last few posts. When you’re finally done, you are peacock-proud of your work. But your right arm is so weak the hammer falls from your hand and rattles around on the ground at your feet. You grasp it to pick it up, but the effort sends burning pain into your elbow and a shock up your arm. You do not have strength enough to grasp and hold the hammer.
So what happened?
You didn’t hit your elbow on anything. And comparatively speaking you spent half as long hammering as you spent raking leaves.
The fact of the matter is that you tired the stronger parts of your body in the morning (you may have even strained your low back a little from all the bending and stooping). So when you went back in the afternoon to start hammering, those great big biceps, triceps, lats and back muscles that would normally take up much of the hammering burden had checked out for the day. And your much weaker, less stable elbow joint took up more of the workload. After a couple of hours, the tendons in your elbow screamed for you to stop. And when you finally did, they were so stretched, strained and torqued out of place, they were actually damaged.
Yes, but why hasn’t it healed after all this time? Why do I still feel pain when I use it?
In essence, your elbow HAS healed, sort of. That halting pain and burn you now feel weeks and months later is caused by scar tissue that formed around your elbow to guard it against further damage. The problem with scar tissue is that it heals in a random fashion. Whereas healthy, uninjured tissue is organized in long, sweeping lines that allow for free, flowing movement, scars are a “disorganized” mass of criss-crossed, tissue. This disorganized (or “hypertonic”) tissue is tight and tense (like a soldier at attention guarding his keep). Rather than allowing free movement, it restricts movement. And it pinches and burns when ordinary movements like tying your shoes or opening a jar tug at it.
Will my elbow ever “really” heal and stop hurting?
Yes, your elbow can heal and the pain can go away forever. But rest, painkillers and anti-inflammatory (probably the things you’ve already tried) will not do the job. What will is specific soft tissue treatment to the injured area.
During an injury-specific treatment (or bodywork) session, I will:
- Break up the hypertonic tissue to immediately allow free movement to the elbow area.
- Enable increased fluid and blood flow to the area to bring the nutrients it needs to fully heal.
- Free the area of adhesions between tendons and muscle fibers to allow complete healing and pain relief for the entire area.
After just one or two sessions, you will be rid of your long-time pain. Strength will return. And so will your enthusiasm for fence-building, spaghetti-pot stirring and tennis!
