When Knee Pain Comes With Golfer's Elbow
I got this comment recently:
Hey Richard, funnily enough I have now developed that elbow pain you were talking about in your book. Has yours healed now? Any tips?
That "elbow pain," for me anyway, was "medial epicondylitis," also known as golfer's elbow.
Some context: I had had the knee pain for a while. The golfer's elbow just came out of the blue. There were no identifiable triggers for it. None at all.
Of course, as many of you know, this led to a lot of musing on my part about the ghost of inflammation loose in the haunted mansion of the body (if you want to ladle on those Halloween metaphors).
In other words, once inflammation takes up shop somewhere, in a matter of time you can develop other weird, seemingly unrelated problems in distant areas of your body. And I think the problems may be connected.
I have not seen a lot of science on this, so I could easily be wrong here. But I find it very odd that, as my knee pain deepened and persisted, various other ailments began to plague me, from the golfer's elbow to back pain (though that had a proximate cause, because I was sitting in an unnatural position).
Anyway, to the question: what to do?
I had terrific success with eccentric bicep curls (look them up on YouTube; you'll find lots of videos).
We're all accustomed to regular bicep curls, where the effort is expended in curling the weight up. For the eccentric version, the emphasis is on slowly releasing the raised weight back down to the starting position.
Over time, I really think this rebuilt the chaotic tendon fibers. My tendons went from being painful and dry and crackly feeling (they were almost like parched sticks, it seemed) to normal. I have no problems today and there's no reduced tendon strength as far as I can tell.
Be patient though. It does take time.
That's my experience, at least. Anyone else with any other ideas?