Hi everybody. It’s Jedd Johnson from DieselCrew.com and what I want to talk to you about today is Elbow Pain.

How to Fix Elbow Pain with Tricep Work?

Do You Have High Elbow Pain?

I just came back from the North American GRIP Sport Championship here in the first weekend of June. I was talking with several guys who are experiencing what I call high forearm or elbow pain. Mainly we are looking at the area in this span all the way around the high forearm portion and where the elbow is. 

This is a part of the arm that can be a real pain in the a## when it comes to performance because on so many lifts whether you’re doing a grip strength, tensile strength or if you are doing something a bit more conventional like dead lifts, squats, bench press, a strong man lifts, the Olympic lifts, in all of these moves the elbows are either producing a great deal of strength over a range of motion or they are acting in stability, and if you have pain in this area it can really cause you problems.

Now, over the years I have put out lots of information on how to address this, but there is one other thing that I want to put up that a lot of people are not identifying as a contributor to their elbow pain, and if elbow pain is something that you have dealt with for a long time and it’s caused you a lot of frustration I want you to make sure you watch the rest of this video.

Are Your Triceps Leading to Your Tennis Elbow Pain?

One time I had a great deal of elbow pain and I was at the end of my rope. I didn’t know what the heck to do and I finally ended up going to a physical therapist. You know I was having all of this pain in this area off to the lateral side of the forearm. It wasn’t in this big meaty area but it was underneath right at the epicondyles. It’s called Tennis Elbow or Lateral Epicondylitis.

And what she said is my triceps were so tight that it was throwing things off in my elbow. So what she did, she didn’t even address very much this high forearm elbow area. What she did, she went back and she worked on the triceps muscle. She said what was going on here is because the triceps were so tight it was pulling on the elbow area and that tension was creating problems for the entire joint

Should You Be Doing the Triceps Stretch?

So think about it. If you’ve got problems but, you know, think of your arm as a big long chain, okay. And what happens is one link is going to affect the rest of the chain. If you think about it that way then it makes total sense. The triceps being so tight its going to create problems for the elbow and it could even lead to further problems down the line as well.

So this is what I do in order to keep this pain away. Just continue to address any ongoing triceps tightness cause I do a lot of pressing activities, overhead press, bench press style movements. The triceps have an opportunity to stay tight.

What you usually see on people doing a triceps stretch looks something like this where they’re pulling their elbow back.

Well I don’t do that.

What You Should Do for Your Tight Triceps

I do something that you can use that will give you a bit more intensity on the stretch. And what I do is I just take a band. This is a purple band and what you do is just put your hand through here. Hook on to the band and you take a step forward and you can lean into this here.

I actually learned stretches of the star from Dick Hartsol at the Pennsylvania State Clinic that I go to every year. Dick generally comes and speaks. He brings the bands with him and he has this apparatus, special apparatus for stretching. Well it looks very similar to a squat cable, just works perfect. I know it’s out of your screen but I pull up right above here I just hook the bands to it and then I can perform the stretch.

But what you are able to do is you are able to get a nice stretch from the elbow itself through the entire triceps all the way to the shoulder. Even works at getting some of your lat a little bit. So if your lats are tight causing problems in your shoulder that can throw your elbow off as well.

Everything just works its way down and if something’s bad up here, it’s going to work its way down up here. So this is something that you should try out. Some triceps stretch in different angles, naturally you are just gonna bounce back and forth. You’re gonna hold it for at least 10 seconds maybe even 30 seconds, but there’s lots of positions that you can use.

Advanced Triceps Stretch for You

You can also change it up a little bit by hooking up your elbow here then your hand around and now I’ve got this, a slightly different stretch. Okay, I can move the elbow away from the head more. Now I am working on stretching the portion of the triceps that lie more inside the arm here. So I come across here, I can stretch the lateral head, the outside head of the triceps but I’ll tell you that works really well and the bands are often going to give you a much more intense stretch than just reaching up and doing the overhead stretch.

So again the idea here is that if  you’ve been contending with this injury for quite some time and everything that you’re doing is not working because you’re addressing just this area, the problem may be lying somewhere else further up the arm. Give some triceps stretches a try and see how it works.

For further information on addressing your elbow pain  you can take advantage of this program at a lower price than it normally would be featuring at. It’s called Fixing Elbow Pain. I put it together with Rick Kaselj and it’s a great product that’s helped out well over a 1000 people to address their elbow problems.

Alright thanks a lot everybody. All the best for your training.

Take care.

Jedd Johnson

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