What causes pain for paddle, pickle and tennis players and how to stay in the game!
Paddle, Pickle, Tennis, a number of great racquet sports that people are playing more than ever, especially Pickleball... two points that are typically popping up for people involve what we call Tennis Elbow or Golfer's Elbow.
Tennis elbow is on the lateral epicondyle, and it's essentially a chronic or acute pain that can exist, right on the tendinous insertion there. Same thing exists on the medial inside of the elbow, and that one referred to as golfer's elbow.
But the basic nature of this is understanding that It is in fact imbalance, weakness, and asymmetry that are still the breeding ground for this chronic pain to exist.
From a postural standpoint, this is tied in with some of the basic realities of overuse of technology. So if I'm a person who's a right dominant individual, and I also have a couple of bad habits with how I might, hold my phone or how I might work with my mouse throughout the day, those bad tendencies and some of my static postures tend to have a direct carryover to my dynamic position.
If I don't have awareness to this, let alone some strategies built out to help me deal with this, I might find myself breaking down and ultimately, having to take breaks or even stop at some point throughout the season, which is not fun. And when we all consider we get a few months, to really get after it, I think we want to make sure that we, minimize the chances of running into problems with injury.
The solution to this problem is really beginning to understand the degree of imbalance, weakness, and asymmetry that exists, and particularly how this pertains to the three nerve chains that innervate everything out into the arms.
Not to be overly technical, but there are three important nerve chains.
There's one called the radial, which innervates your thumb and index finger, the median, your middle finger, ulnar, essentially your bottom two.
And the bottom line is as a result of an imbalance of use likely correlated to an overuse of technology throughout your day, your body, the moment you go to pick up your racket is already slated to do it in an offset position, very similar to probably how you're sitting or, standing in static postures.
The key is to implement a strategy to completely reverse this, change the trajectoriy and course of any of these ailments and get out of pain:
- Manipulation of tissue
- Specific stretches and strengthening efforts
