Sometimes I suffer from tennis elbow, then again from a golfer’s arm. Is there one brace for both problems?
Joris Bartstra, journalist with medical diploma
The tennis elbow and the golfer’s arm are painful inflammations in the tendons of the forearm. Those inflammations are a result of overload; as a result, small tears have arisen in the tendons, and the clearing and repair of the damaged tissue is accompanied by sensitivity. The pain has a function, namely that you give the vulnerable new tissue rest.
With tennis elbow, the outer lump of your elbow hurts, where the extensor muscles of your fingers and wrist attach. You use it in tennis with the backhand, for example. A golfer’s arm is the innermost cusp of the elbow. That also burdens you in tennis, namely by hitting with the forehand. For the sake of distinction, this is called a golfer’s arm.
If you suffer from it, you regularly feel a nasty stab of pain. Fixing it completely (for example with plaster) is not a good idea; the recovery then gets off to a bad start because the blood flow decreases and the muscles weaken. You should actually keep moving your arms well, but try to avoid pain.
According to the Dutch College of General Practitioners, braces, splints and other aids for fixation of the elbow are not useful. The idea behind a brace (a tight band around the forearm, where the muscles are thickest) is twofold: the muscles can swell less and therefore deliver less force, and the angle at which the tendons attach to the bone would slightly change. It is often only a small strand of fibers that causes the problems. You might just be able to spare that because other fibers take over the work. Most braces have a pressure pad that you place just before the tendon attaches to the bone. You can twist that and turn a tennis elbow brace into a golf arm brace. There are also braces on the market with two of those pads.
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