Elbow Pain When Working Out (WHY & HOW TO FIX IT!!)

Stop letting pain prevent your gains (train like an athlete here)

it’s hard to believe that this little area right here is enough to take down even the toughest guys in the gym when it gets injured today I’m going to talk to you about why it happens and more importantly what you can do to make sure it doesn’t what’s up guys Jeff Cavalier athle x. com elbow pain when you’re lifting it’s one of the most debilitating injuries you can face if you’re in the gym and why because it’s actually one of the most longstanding issues once you have it anybody that’s trained for any length of time has probably had elbow pain at some point that’s kept you out of the gym and maybe kept you out for a long time or made you alter the exercises that you’re doing there’s two types of pain though that we’re going to get in our elbow it’s going to be either on the inside of the elbow here or it’s going to be on the outside of the elbow right here okay that’s the difference between tennis elbow and what we call golfer’s elbow tennis elbow again being on the outside here and golfer’s elbow being on the inside but guess what guys this isn’t the problem the elbow has nothing to do with it this elbow problem is a wrist problem or it could be a strength problem somewhere else compensation is what causes the elbow to take the brunt of your weakness or your immobility so what I want to do today is show you what’s actually causing it whether it be golfer’s elbow or tennis elbow and more importantly what you can do to fix it and then how you can get back in the gym if you’ve been hung up or laid up for a while with it so let’s take a look at this right now guys we’ve got a look at our forearm if you want to identify these two points what you have to do is just take your arm here take your fingers kind of like in an L shape here and just put it right over the top right in the crook of your elbow when you reach around and grab where your thumb goes here this is the medial Epicon that’s going to be where your forearm flexors attach all these muscles here that flex your forearm if your ones on the outside here with your fingers that’s the lateral epic cond those are going to be your extensors in your forearm that do this those all attach out here we have two things that go wrong whether it be in in medial or lateral the problem is either you are overusing the muscles in in a in a weakened state or you have an inability to control the Ecentric contraction of that muscle so let’s take a look first at the medial elbow all right so let’s take a look at that inside elbow and again I think it’s the most common source of pain guys will get the inside elbow pain because they’re not strong enough when they’re doing their pulling exercises this is a pulling exercise flaw if you take this band we try to simulate what’s going on with our muscle it basically is going to take you know they’re going to start from the wrist here they take all the common flexors inside the fingers they all come together and then they attach right here up on the inside of the elbow so when we pull up on here it actually pulls the wrist up now when you’re doing an exercise like the chin up as I’m demonstrating here you can see that as I’m pulling myself to the bar what do I do what do most people do when they’re trying to cheat the chin up they curl their forearms they use their forearm flexors cuz they’re afraid that they either don’t have the uh strength in their back or their biceps to get them up to the bar so they use the help of the forearms the problem is then on the way down after they’ve curled their forearms in as they come down they let that just kind of flop back into a straighten position so you’re getting this Ecentric overload that is way too much for your your uh for flexors to handle you’re talking about the whole weight of your body being attacked with an Ecentric chin up you know that’s not enough you it’s really tough to have the adequate strength to handle that unless you’re working on your forearms directly or you do what I tell you in a little bit here to fix this say uh same thing on a row if you look here back at the skeleton if I row and I’m trying to pull the row you know the the weight in here like a seated row again as I get here how do we feel as if we get that bar a little bit closer how do we get that how do get that handle a little bit closer to our to our belly like we’re finishing out the movement we do it by just curling the wrist in you know using the forearms to flex in it pulls it without actually having to get our elbow any further past our body it’s sort of an illusion we want to feel as if it’s getting to our chest but we know we can’t get it there with the strength of our rids and back alone so we cheat it and we pull with the forarm and again what happens when we come out we usually straight in the arm and again an Ecentric overload here on the middle of the elbow so two examples there again I’m pulling exercises where the weakness usually of the muscles that you’re training causes you to compensate and use the muscles that probably shouldn’t be doing the work yeah they’re there to assist but they shouldn’t be trying to do all the work and I’m going to tell you again what you should do to fix it matter of fact let’s talk about it right now okay so if you want to try to get rid of that medial elbow pain the first thing you’re going to want to do is start to stretch that out a little bit it’s probably sore it’s probably inflamed you’re probably going to have to take some time away from the gym to let that calm down all right but you’re going to want to stretch that out by straightening the elbow and then extending the wrist right because it crosses you’re talking about a two joint uh muscle here so you straighten the elbow you uh extend the wrist back stretch it out hold it do that a few times uh each day ice it if you need to when it starts to feel like you’re capable of getting back in the gym the key thing here guys is neutral wrist position I don’t care if you have to drop the waight that you’re using watch again as I do this chin up instead of letting myself go into the cheap version of this by pulling my down towards me and activating my forearm flexors let’s keep a neutral grip better yet if I even had a bar that I could do a neutral grip on where I could keep my hands side you know facing each other and again not bending back or not bending forward that would be a great option especially as you’re getting back into the game so drop the weights a little bit reinforce the neutral wrist which is here again Not Bent this way at all and also not bent backwards and keep that for all of your movements that you’re doing your pulling movements uh for in your workout and you should start to see that this will get better and better and better over time and you’ll start to be able to overcome that long term you’re going to want to start including forearm work to make sure that your forarms are adequately strong to handle these stresses if you encounter them again but you should be getting better at being able to control the wrist flexion all right so let’s talk about the outside of the elbow now we have the exact opposite situation again the muscles cross through the wrist and then they come out to the outside elbow on the top part up in here okay and when you get that pull of the mus muscle you’re going to cause an extension back here of the wrist like that now where I see the problems here is not necessarily it although it does happen with the Ecentric overload here too but where I see the problem is it’s from this chronic extended ham position that the the um that we were in when we’re in the gym if we’re grabbing dumbbells as you can see here you can see that the muscles are chronically in this contracted shortened State on the back of our forearms the overuse comes here this is where some people will break down even at a co