How to do Physical Therapy for Tennis Elbow

Physical therapy for tennis elbow is great.  It gives you a way to build your strength back up to where it was, swing a racket again, and protect yourself from further injury.  Assuming your muscles are all healed now, lets get started.

See, when you have your lateral epicondyle tendon inflamed in your tennis elbow, the muscles are straining the tendon every time you tense your forearm muscles.  Also, if your tennis elbow was brought on in sudden incident or flare-up, you may have a slight muscle pull or strain in addition to your tendon trouble. 

The first step once you’ve started resting your arm for a few days and taking some anti-inflamitories is to get your elbow back to a state of no pain.  This means working all the tight spots out of your muscles and waiting till your body has healed to the point where your can move your limbs and pick up your fork and knife at dinner without pain.  If you’re not there yet, work out your trigger points, RICE it, and try some other home remedies so your elbow feels ‘normal’ when you’re not lifting more than a pound of two.

I’m assuming you’re pain free right now, with the pain only coming back when you play your sport or life something heavy (5 lb.+).

At this point, do lots of repetitions of light weights to get your elbow support muscles back to full health.  So, find a weight you feel comfortable doing 12, 20 or 30 repetitions with.

Get into a regular regime with them and steadily do more day by day.  MAKE SURE YOU NEVER FEEL YOUR ELBOW PAIN COMING BACK!!  If the pain starts coming back, back off and reevaluate.  You can always go slower and get back to your previous level of fitness, but don’t push it.  Re-injury is not fun.

Track your progress and slowly add more reps till you can do around 30 without pain, and then move to a weight 2 and a half pounds heavier.  Slowly, incrementally, increase the weight you can lift without pain.

As for specific exercises, my physical therapist recommended that I do Tricep Extensions and Pushups to rehabilitate the elbow support muscles.

Pushups are easy to do and require no equipment, and you can do tricep extensions with anything lying around (jam jars, cans of beans, light dumbells, bags of lead shot, etc.  Be creative.).  Also, you can alter pushups to do them on your knees to make them easier, so they’re pretty variable and easy to control.  The photos below show you the basic way of doing the exercises, but if you want more in-depth information there are plenty of exercise websites where you can find more detailed instructions.

How to Perform a Tricep Extension

How to Perform a Pushup

Record your progress on these exercises, and gradually increase the number of reps, and then drop the number of reps and increase the weight slowly.  Go slow and get strong again. If you want more info, go back to the main hompage and get advice for tennis elbow.