How To Fix Elbow Pain (BULLETPROOF YOUR ELBOWS!)

Now I’ve personally experienced elbow pain and tennis elbow before and I know it’s not fun. It hinders our training, diminishes our performance, and it just plain hurts. So today I want to go over 3 elbow pain causes that are likely contributing to your elbow pain when working out and what you need to do in order to not only fix your elbow pain but the exercises to do for elbow pain that’ll prevent it from coming back. This way, you can start lifting pain free as soon as possible and protect this joint for life.

The first culprit is an imbalance in your forearm strength and just weak grip strength in general. Weak extensor muscles in the forearm are the main culprit for elbow pain and studies cite “repetitive gripping” to be the cause of elbow pain. So strengthening your forearms, especially your extensors, as well as increasing your overall grip strength is what’s key to creating bullet-proof elbows and has consistently been shown to be an effective approach to relieving elbow pain. And the simplest way to start out is to regularly perform standard wrist extensions to help strengthen and build more endurance in your weaker wrist extensors. If however the pain you experience is on the inside of your elbow rather than on the outside, then you’d want to perform wrist curls instead of wrist extensions to help build the endurance of your wrist flexors since in this case you have the opposite imbalance.

So we addressed a problem below the elbow, but now we need to look above the elbow for some other possible elbow pain causes. And the most common culprit here is weakness in the muscles involved in stabilizing the shoulder and scapula. Because a lack of stabilization here then means that the muscles surrounding your elbow joint will be forced to work overtime to compensate for that lack of stability during our pushing and pulling exercises. Which again leads to elbow pain due to overuse and over-dependence on these forearm muscles. I have put out quite a few videos that address these muscles (linked below). But some of the best options for you to get started with would be exercises like scapular pull-ups to help strengthen the traps, and then simple external rotation movements to help strengthen your rotator cuff.

The last cause of elbow pain when working out, or the worsening of your existing elbow pain, is often due to just trying to “push through the pain”. When you feel discomfort in your joints, don’t ignore it. For this reason, dumbbells will become your best friend as they allow you to manipulate your hand position into basically any position that feels comfortable. Basically, we want to take our hands out of a supinated or pronated position and instead into a neutral grip as much as possible, since this places the least stress on our forearm muscles and eliminates our tendency to excessively flex and extend our wrist as we perform our exercises.

In addition, to fix your elbow pain, you want to always be mindful of your wrist positioning during your exercises. Avoid flexing or extending your wrists excessively during exercises like chin-ups, curls, and even pushdowns as this creates a ton of stress on the forearm muscles and tendons. Instead, focus on keeping the wrist neutral and in line with your forearms as you perform these movements.

To sum up the video, here are the steps and exercises to keep in mind for elbow pain:

First, dedicate more time to your forearm training and grip training.

Pain on outside of elbow = Wrist extensions: 3 sets of 10 reps
Pain on inside of elbow = Wrist curls: 3 sets of 10 reps
Suitcase carries: 3 sets of 30s walks each side

Then, address potential weaknesses in your shoulder and scapular stabilizer muscles.

Scapular pull-ups: 3 sets of 10 reps
External rotation exercise: 3 sets of 5-10 reps

And finally, manipulate your exercises and be mindful of your wrist positioning to avoid worsening the pain.

Implement more neutral grip exercises: Hammer curls, neutral grip presses, neutral grip rows, etc.

But all in all, you need to realize that if you’re feeling stress in certain joints then it’s often a result of imbalances or weaknesses elsewhere in the body. And for a step-by-step program that prevents this from happening by showing you exactly how to train to maximize growth while correcting your imbalances and weaknesses in the process, then simply take the analysis quiz to discover which science-based program would be best for you and where your body is currently at below:

Filmed by: Bruno Martin Del Campo

SHOULDER STABILITY VIDEO:

SCAPULAR STABILITY VIDEOS:

[JeremyEthier]

Hope you enjoyed this one! What joints would you like to see me cover next (knees, shoulders, wrist, etc.)? Comment below and I’ll start planning on it!

[lukastreuer]

The editing is out of this world. This is beyond professional.

[alinamesquita]

i started feeling elbow pain a few weeks ago... all my life i had a terrible wrist pain, i went to doctors, did exams etc, i was diagnosed with tenosynovitis, but no one never told me it could be due to lack of forearm strength. when i started feeling my elbows, i suspected it could have something to do with my wrist, so i started doing some strength exercises for the forearms and then, like magic, in a few days, my elbows and my wrist pains were gone. it’s amazing to see your explanations bc it’s exactly what i felt.

[CarlosAponte]

Shoulder and wrist pain seem to hinder me the most as a beginner to exercising. Appreciate your workout videos, i’ve learned a lot.

[nombreapellido]

Me: suffering elbow pain
Jeremy: here you have your specific video

[VoxSpark]

3 years later and I think you just saved my gains. thank you

[DEJagor]

The wrist curls is the only thing that helped me to stop the inside elbow pain. Thank you so much for the video! My imbalance is starting right above the elbow and this exercise helps this area a lot.

[TrenBarry]

It’s unbelievable how my elbow pain came back and I was looking for an answer on how to get rid of the pain. it affects my workouts and daily life. god answered my prayers and sent help through you to help me. Thank you Jeremy!

[dorisgarcia]

I’m not a bodybuilder but this is exactly what I’ve been feeling for the past two months. First the elbow pain and just this week my shoulder, all in the same side. Thank you for your help. 👍🏻

[livelifestrong]

I’ve had elbow pain in the past many times and I’ve searched online for causes and cures, but this is by FAR the most thorough and well taught video/online source. This is when his animations and visuals really shine and drills the explanation. Oddly enough this is by far my favorite video yet from Jeremy. Thanks bro!

[lisettegarcia]

I really appreciated this approach. Everything I found online was just to ice and rest when I know the problem was due to weakness. So, letting the imbalance atrophy further seemed like no solution at all. Thank you for offering sane and safe alternatives to outgrow the pain rather than shrink from it.

[johndavid]

I recently developed pain in my elbow for the first time ever in my life. The pain completely crippled and destroyed my work out plan. I watched several videos on "how to fix elbow pain" over the past 4/5 months and none of them worked. I started getting extremely discouraged. I stumbled across this video over the weekend and after performing the exercises presented in this video, I felt INSTANT relief in my elbow. I am in total disbelief as to how much this is helping. I would have never thought that week mid/lower traps would have been the problem but here I am almost pain free after just 3 days of these exercises. THANK YOU FOR POSTING THIS VIDEO!!!

[sleepiesheep]

This is a weird one, but I found finger push-ups, on knees helped me to address the elbow pain. Apart from that, the shoulder blades workout and lower traps workout as explained in Jeremy's videos have been tremendously helpful :) Keep up the good work, Jeremy!

[krisu]

I've been suffering from elbow pain for quite a while now, so this comes in handy. Thanks Jeremy! My elbow has been better by just training with lighter weights and increasing weights back where I was before injury, but still skullcrushers and reverse curls make my right elbow hurt.

[roxstarfailure]

this man is truly a blessing to us, giving us who currently suffer from tennis elbow, for free

[abrahandelabastida]

This guy helped me fix elbow pain, shoulder pain and rounded shoulders. All while still being able to workout regularly. Thank you :, ^)

[InsendoChavero]

Been dealing with a tennis elbow for about a month now and just been powering through it. Thanks for the info Jeremy.

[joshblunt]

I found that stretching the fingers and wrists helps a lot with pain in the elbow as well. While coupling that with building up the stabilizer muscles around the joints. Thanks for the content 💪

[peterpanda]

Man I love this guy, he covered one of the main things I’ve never gotten an answer to. Thank you!

[edalbyek]

I get a lot of pain in the left inner part of my elbow after push-ups or most triceps workouts. This helps a lot