Hello everyone,

I have just overcome my golfer's elbow with a combined approach of pin firing and some exercises from Overcoming Tendonitis and wanted to share the results with you.

Me: 33 year old male, 174 cm, 83 kg (sorry for the non-freedom units!)

My golfer's elbow was in my right elbow and it manifested itself in different stages:

Stage 1: Got golfers elbow when squatting with a thumbless grip. I switched to a thumb grip and the pain went away, so I was fine with it.
Stage 2: Got pain in my forearm when doing biceps curls. After doing a bit of reading, I found that this was related to golfer's elbow. I spoke to my doctor and he told me to switch to hammer curls, which I did. The pain went away, but I was not too happy as I did not want to miss any exercises...
Stage 3: Over Christmas I got into an intense arm wrestling match with my brother... after which the pain came back with a vengeance.

At this point I decided that I could no longer just avoid everything. I don't mind doing squats with a thumbs-up grip, I'm not at a disadvantage. But not being able to do regular curls is not cool, and after the arm wrestling it was clear to me that I could not just avoid so many things.
So I decided to do something about it.
I used a modified and combined approach, using both pin firing via chin ups, but also some wrist exercises as described by Steven Low in his Overcoming Tendonitis:


Steven describes that scientific evidence shows that the eccentric part is the most important part of the cure. As I cannot do a lot of chin-ups, I used a resistance band and also jumped up to the bar to help with the concentric part. For the eccentric part I slowly lowered myself so that I had about 3-5s of eccentric on each rep. I did this every 5 days as Mark recommended.

I also did 3 sets of about 20 reps of wrist curls + finger curls (combined) and 3 sets of about 20 reps of wrist flexion with a dumbbell every 2nd day. Again, I assisted with the other hand for the concentric part and focused mainly on slow eccentrics.


I was able to gradually increase the volume of the chin-ups.
Session 1: 5x3, 8x2, 4x1 = 35 reps
Session 2: 20 x 2 = 40 reps
Session 3: 25 x 2 = 50 reps
Session 4: 30 x 2 = 60 reps

During the first 3 sessions the pain was severe and after about 5-6 sets it became really difficult to bear. I always took a paracetamol about 2/3 of the way through the session as I knew it would take 20-30 minutes for it to kick in. For example, in session 2 I took the pill between set 12 and 13. It still took about 15 minutes after I finished before the pain became manageable. Within an hour or so it would be completely gone.

Session 3 of chin-ups was still painful as hell, so I was doubting if it was gonna work... but then suddenly session 4 the pain was almost completely gone, maybe going up to a 2 or something during the last few sets.
Now I am pain free again!

So I wanted to share my experience with you here and motivate you to try this if you suffer from golfers elbow!

Cheers