Battling Tennis Elbow

Justin James
Jul 30, 2017 · 2 min read

I’ve been sitting at a desk for the overwhelming majority of my waking hours for about 20 years. Even in high school, when I wasn’t at school, I was probably in front of my computer. Today I typically am in front of a computer for 12 hours a day during the week, and 4–6 hours a day on the weekends.

When I started working out, about 8 years ago, I rapidly developed an excruciating case of tennis elbow. It was so bad that I could not close a window. The fix was to stop doing barbell curls with the “EZ curl” barbell. The tennis elbow has been back a few times since then. My most recent flareup started about three months ago. At first, just doing some stretches helped. Then I was taking Aleeve three times a day. Eventually it got so bad I was waking up in the middle of the night in pain, and doing my job was nearly impossible. I refuse to take narcotics, opiates, or other prescription painkillers and muscle relaxants, so it looked like my next option was going to be surgery or some other sort of invasive medical intervention.

In desperation, I gave the Internet one last search, and came across “rubber bar therapy”. In a nutshell, it involves getting a thick rubber bar and bending and twisting it. I looked them up on Amazon and discovered that Theraband makes the rubber bars. I love my Theracane and I have trust in Theraband to not sell snake oil. And for $12 or so on Amazon, it was a low financial risk.

Within 60 seconds of using the rubber bar as directed in the instructions, I felt immediate, overwhelming relief. Is the tennis elbow perfect now? No way. But it has shifting from having shooting pain alternating with partial numbness and semi-paralysis from the moment I sat down every day, to simply feeling like I have a deep bruise near the elbow. That is nothing short of amazing. I keep the rubber bar on my desk, do the exercises a few times a day, and it doubles as a roller to help work over my carpal tunnel and roll out my forearm and shoulder to continue to relief pain throughout the day.

If you are a heaving computer user like me, and suffer from tennis elbow (or it’s partner-in-crime, golfer’s elbow), I suggest that you try rubber bar therapy and see if it can help you.

J.Ja

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