Golfer's elbow can be an aggravation that negatively impacts one's swing. Learn how to treat sports injuries in this video on health and rehab.
Apply ice
Use ultrasound
Wrist flexor and elbow strengthening
Wear a splint that applies pressure
Russ Paine is a well-known physical therapist with the Roger Clemens Institute at Memorial Hospital. After getting his degree in physical therapy from Texas Women's University, he trained for several years under David Drez, MD, a renowned surgeon and sports medicine specialist. He has been a rehab consultant for the Houston Rockets, Houston Astros and NASA. He has given hundreds of presentations in his career in the US and abroad, and has published many chapters in text books and papers in peer review journals.
RUSS PAINE: So what we'd like to do now is talk to you a little bit about some balance and coordination exercises using the wobble board. The reason that you do this is when you injure your ankle or knee or hip, your lower extremity - we call that part of the kinetic chain - you actually damage some of the receptors in your joint that tell you where your joint is in space. Like if I put my hand behind my head, I know exactly where it is. I'm not moving it at all. So you've got these little nerve endings called proprioceptors that give you feedback. So when you injure your ankle or knee, we can strengthen it and get the motion back. To get you back to the fullest extent, we have to do some proprioceptive balance exercises to overload that system so other things can kind of compensate for that. So Orlando here is going to show us a few exercises and we'll just talk you through them. This is a typical wobble board. You can actually make one of these on your own. And the goal is for a pretty healthy person is to try to balance on that thing with both legs 20 seconds at a time and do three sets of that. So initially, the first thing you want to do is just pure balancing. And again, your muscles are firing like crazy to try to stabilize that position. We're going to progress to two legs to a single leg. And again, if you have an ankle injury, this is going to take you a little bit of time. It's not going to happen in the first exercise session. So again, this is a pretty difficult maneuver here to balance on one leg on the wobble board. Okay? And you can use the opposite extremity to kind of control your balance. Then you can also do a squatting activity. So, Orlando, let's show that. This is a really good exercise to do if you're trying to combine balance and strengthening. A lot of people want to do something else beside just squats. So nowadays, we're doing a lot of balance and coordination in combination with strengthening. Face the other way and do the same thing. So if you go this direction, it's a little bit easier because you're in line with the action of the balance board. So you can squat down, hold that position and come back up. And another thing we can do is if you have a partner or if you can bounce a ball up against a wall - just go ahead and stand and face me, Orlando - is just stand on both legs, and you can see that your proprioceptive balance is composed of several senses: one being your vision, your auditory, your proprioceptive system and your kinesthetic or muscle system. So you can see that he was looking at the ground the whole time. Now, we're going to make him look up at us so he has to catch the ball. If he doesn't catch the ball, it's going to hit him in the head, so he's aware of this. So again, in this we're taking away one of his senses and forcing that proprioceptive system to be overloaded, because his vision now is looking at me versus looking at the ground. So these are just some things that we might do with a wobble board to kind of overload the proprioceptive system that's been damaged.
