If you have pain on the inside or outside of your elbow, especially when gripping or lifting something, you likely have tennis or golfer’s elbow. There are several predisposing causes that make you more prone to developing these conditions. If you and your chiropractor can find what the predisposing cause is, it becomes very easy to resolve and prevent future occurrences.

Tennis elbow and golfer’s elbow got their names from the sports that commonly trigger the condition. Overuse of the muscles and tendons that attach to the bony prominences of the elbow develop into tendonitis (inflamed tendon). This occurs on the outside (tennis) or inside (golfer’s) of the elbow.

Activities such as tennis, golf or other repetitive movements are often the trigger. However, it is quite common to have a predisposing cause, or “weakness,” that makes you more prone to triggering the condition.

A common predisposing cause is the compensations your body makes after an old injury that makes you more prone to a new injury.

Here’s what happens when your body suffers an injury: 

Your nervous system controls the strength, tone and coordination of every muscle in your body. Injuries cause your nervous system to rewire itself in order to compensate for the pain. Compensations distort your posture, shift bones and joints out of proper alignment, and create muscle tightness, weakness, and loss of flexibility. Compensations change the way you were naturally designed to move. Months and years of compensation lead to the chronic wear and tear conditions many of us suffer from, including tennis or golfer’s elbow.

As an example, you may have injured your shoulder years ago that made you compensate by changing the way you move your arm and grip objects. Over time, the elbow becomes the site of overuse and abuse, resulting in painful tendinitis. In this case, the shoulder likely has some muscle tightness, weakness or alignment issue that needs to be fixed in order to resolve the elbow problem.

It is common for compensations to stay “hard-wired” even after the initial injury has healed. The bottom line is, the nervous system typically does not rewire itself back to normal on its own. It needs to be “reset,” like resetting a blown circuit breaker. The good news is there are various chiropractic and manual therapy methods that accomplish this goal.

We understand the intricate ways in which the nervous system compensates for old injuries and how to effectively find and treat the predisposing cause of tennis and golfer’s elbow. This is what makes us unique and different compared to other providers that treat these conditions. “Resetting” the nervous system back to normal with chiropractic adjustments, manual therapy, and corrective exercises is the key to fixing the real cause of these conditions. Treating the underlying cause of the problem is what helps our patients recover from these types of conditions in a relatively short period of time.

We help people with tennis and golfer’s elbow everyday.  If you or someone you know is suffering from tennis or golfer’s elbow, contact us to see if we can help.