Tennis Elbow Solved

Tennis elbow is best thought of as a tendinopathy caused by overuse of your wrist and forearm muscles. This is primarily caused by any activity that repetitively overloads the tendon or when the load being applied to the tendon puts too much stress on the tendon too quickly for it to withstand leading to microtrauma. For instance, maybe you spent a few hours painting your house over the weekend. It wasn’t too hard at the time, but because this is an unfamiliar activity it may be too much, too soon, and overload the tendon in your elbow leading to irritation and microtears.

The main risk factors that can lead to developing tennis elbow are:

• Age: people over the age of 30 are at greater risk of developing tennis elbow.
• People with tennis elbow are more likely to have upper limb injuries Eg rotator cuff tendinopathy or carpal tunnel syndrome.
• More common in occupations involving repetitive use of the hands (>2 hours per day), tool use and regular lifting.
• Tennis elbow is more common in people who play racquet sports Eg tennis, squash, golf.

How does Physiotherapy Help?

Although tennis elbow is a self-limiting condition it can be a difficult one to completely cure. Generally, tennis elbow will last somewhere between six months to two years if left untreated – half of all patients report not being fully recovered at the 12-month mark. Additionally, recurrence of the injury is very high. That’s why it is vital to immediately seek treatment from our team of experienced physiotherapists here at Fixio. After an accurate diagnosis of tennis elbow, we’ll get started with treatment during our very first session to make sure this injury doesn’t hold you back for long.

The main aspect of treatment during the initial phase of tennis elbow is to help settle the pain. We can assist with that through a number of different treatment techniques.

Some of the techniques we may use are:

• Activity modification to reduce aggravation e.g. initially reducing the amount of tennis you play on the weekend to help let the pain settle
• Ice for pain relief
• Manual therapy, including soft tissue massage and joint mobilisations around the neck, shoulder, elbow, and wrist
• Neurodynamic nerve stretching to help loosen any tight nerves in the surrounding area and relieve irritation
• Taping/bracing to offload the wrist extensor tendons
• Using non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (in conjunction with your G.P.)

Once the acute painful stage has begun to settle, the body needs to start building the functional capacity in the tendon. We do this by implementing a gradual strengthening program in conjunction with slowly building up towards all your regular activities that it hinders such as rock climbing, surfing, swimming and of course… tennis!