How To Treat Tennis Elbow Video

Tennis elbow injuries can be one long frustration for the tennis player. Learn how to treat sports injuries in this video on health and rehab.

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Rest elbow
Ice and massage elbow
Try ultrasound and deep friction massage

About this Author

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: Today, we're going to be talking about tennis elbow, or lateral epicondylitis is the medical terminology for this. You do not have to be a tennis player to have tennis elbow. This can be a very achy, dull ache, toothache-type pain on the outside of your elbow. And this picture depicts lateral epicondylitis. As you can see you have the wrist extensor tendons, and these muscles do this to your wrist. So one of the problems that you have with tennis elbows is you pick up a coffee cup to drink, you feel pain in your elbow, and that is because you have a slight extension in your wrist when you do that activity. So here is the muscle and this is the tendon. And those tendons come together to form one common tendon that inserts into this bone. And a tennis elbow is actually a very slight tearing away of those tendons away from the bone. You have micro tears of the tendon. It can be a very painful and a debilitating problem. So again, where this is located is on, this is the mobile wad of wrist extensors here. They come together and form a common tendon right on the outside of your elbow. So if you have tennis elbow, it can be very, very painful as you palpate and touch this area. So treatment for this is rest. Sometimes you will have a wrist splint so that you sleep in a night splint that keeps your wrist in a neutral position to take pressure off of the elbow. Because when you rest, your wrist goes down and put a stretch on the tendon, so that may be helpful. Another thing we do is ice massage, ultrasound. Sometimes some deep-friction massages help this. And the thing we do in therapy called the iontophoreses, which is an electrical stimulator that delivers cortisone through your skin with a patch. And then we also do wrist extensor strengthening, elbow over the edge of a table with a one- or two-pound weight doing three sets of 10 to strengthen the wrist extensors. But the most important thing is that you don't push through pain with this activity. And anti-inflammatory medicine, ice application, rest along with elbow splints to alleviate that pressure are the treatment for a tennis elbow.

How to Treat Tennis Elbow Video

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