How To Fix Elbox Pain From Tricep Extension

Dealing with elbow pain during the bench press can exist an annoying injury. Fortunately, with optimal direction, you can overcome it. Here's exactly how to do that.

What Does "Tendinopathy" Mean Anyways?

Tendinopathy is the wide term used in the medical profession to draw painful weather condition occurring in and around tendons. We used to categorize tendon pain as either "tendinitis" if it was more in the acute stages and "tendinosis" if it was in more of a degenerative land, but this is no longer the instance.

Evidence suggests that in that location may non even be an inflammatory component to tendinopathies, hence the recommendation to avoid the term "tendinitis" (which implies a case of inflammation).

Instead, we now categorize tendinopathy on a continuum as being either reactive, in dysrepair, or degenerative. Direction for each of these cases volition exist different likewise.

What Causes Tendinopathy?

Tendinopathy usually occurs when you overload a tendon too quickly. It's not that y'all did something "wrong," rather you may have only done besides much, too fast, too shortly. As a event, you experience hurting and discomfort in the tendon.

The central to overcoming it is modifying the manner you perform the activity to temporarily offload it, and and so gradually exposing it to the load once again in order to forcefulness an adaptation. As you will see, this is exactly how y'all'll overcome your elbow pain during demote press.

What is Triceps Tendinopathy?

Triceps tendinopathy is characterized by pain and discomfort in the back of your elbow. It is usually localized to where your triceps tendon attaches to the olecranon procedure of your elbow.

distal triceps tendon

While pain can also occur on the inside of the elbow (medial epicondylalgia a.k.a "golfer's elbow), or on the exterior of the elbow (lateral epicondylalgia a.thousand.a "tennis elbow"), nosotros will be focusing purely on triceps tendinopathy in this article.

If you're dealing with elbow pain during the bench printing, in that location'south a proficient adventure you're dealing with a triceps tendinopathy. The first pace to overcoming this is modifying your elevator to remove the aggravating cistron.

What's Aggravating Your Elbow?

There are a few mutual aggravating factors that could be causing your elbow pain during the bench press. Sometimes, information technology's only painful at a specific function of the elevator. Other times it may be aggravated at only higher intensities.

Are you simply experiencing posterior elbow pain at a certain RPE or percentage of 1-rep max? Maybe it's only happening on the final few reps of your last set. If that's the instance, and then decreasing the load and slowing the movement downwards may be your all-time bet.

Decrease the Load and Deadening the Movement Down

Cranky tendons beloved tempo. If you're experiencing elbow pain during the bench press, work on slowing the movement downwardly. For the tempo bench press, I'd recommend a 3:0:iii speed. This consists of a 3 second eccentric (lowering phase), no pause at the bottom, and a iii 2d concentric (lifting phase).

Since you're slowing the movement downwardly, you won't need to go as heavy to achieve a sufficient mechanical stimulus either. Decreasing the load and performing a tempo demote press may be all you need to do in order to overcome your elbow pain.

Widen Your Bench Press Grip

Another modification you lot can make to help reduce your elbow pain during the bench press is to widen your grip. For a given weight, narrower grips will place more stress on the triceps.

As you widen the grip, it will generally shift the stress off of the triceps and more onto the pectorals. This may be exactly what you lot want to practise initially if you have elbow hurting with the bench press.

Widening the grip tin can assist temporarily offload your triceps and make it more tolerable for your elbow overall.

Limit the Painful Part of the ROM

Pain at the bottom of the lift. If yous're simply having elbow pain at the lesser of the demote press, you can effort and perform a variation similar the floor printing or pin press to temporarily limit it. By limiting the aggravating portion of the elevator, you can proceed to arm-twist a tolerable training result.

Hurting at lockout. Sometimes, triceps tendinopathy only hurts at the lockout of the lift. In this case, yous tin can temporarily perform a "soft lockout" during the demote printing or overhead press. In other words, instead of aggressively locking your elbow into extension at the top, stop the movement just before the lockout.

The entire goal of the first phase of overcoming your triceps tendon hurting is limiting the aggravating gene. As you can see, past manipulation of form, load, and ROM, you take a lot of options.

Dosing in Isometrics for Pain Control

Some other useful tactic for managing tendinopathy is dosing in isometrics. Isometrics have been shown to produce an analgesic pain-reducing outcome. This would be especially useful if you're someone dealing with elbow pain correct at lockout.

After a period of fourth dimension of modification and avoidance (limiting the lockout position), y'all tin add together in exercises like shoulder taps or an alternating dumbbell bench press so that you spend MORE time in the lockout position to force the adaptation.

While the shoulder tap practice is traditional used for shoulder stability, information technology tin also be benign for treating a triceps tendinopathy due to the increased isometric demands of the triceps.

The alternating dumbbell bench press forces you to maintain an isometric triceps contraction on the non-working arm while the other arm is doing the motion! However, you can't alter and avoid forever…

Sometimes With Tendons…Y'all But Demand to Load it!

While eliminating and modifying the aggravating factors for your elbow pain is certainly an important step to mitigating symptoms, it's not the simply step. Once symptoms at-home down, it's of import to straight load the tendon over again to build upward its strength and capacity!

1 fashion to build tendon strength is to direct load it with an isolation exercise. If you're dealing with a triceps tendinopathy or elbow pain with the bench press, dosing in a pushdown movement works really well here. Unilateral underhand cable extensions or banded pushdowns are ii great options.

Ideally, you would perform both of these with a much slower tempo than the video shows. Think the 3:0:3 guideline – iii seconds on the way down and iii seconds on the fashion up.

I would dose these in 3x/calendar week at the end of your workout for 3 sets of ten-15 reps. Brand sure you take 24-48 hours residue in between sessions likewise to allow for optimal recovery.

Does This Process Demand to Be Pain-Free?

When dealing with whatsoever tendinopathy, the process itself does NOT need to exist pain-complimentary, but it should be tolerable. For the exercise modifications and isolation work, more often than not you lot tin can work into a iii-4/10 hurting as long as it's not worse 24 hours after your workout.

If y'all experience a flare-upward 24 hours afterward, your symptoms would be considered "irritable" and you may need to go dorsum to the drawing board and manipulate the ROM or dosage again.

If, instead, y'all piece of work into a 3-4/10 pain, but your symptoms are back to baseline, this would be considered a stable response, and you go on to continue as planned. I explicate the procedure of training with pain in more particular in this Whiteboard Wednesday YouTube Video.

What Virtually Soft Tissue Piece of work? Should I Be Massaging or Stretching My Triceps?

Massaging and stretching may help temporarily modify your hurting, but they aren't going to permanently fix anything. So while I don't personally prescribe these, if you get temporarily relief from it and it makes you feel adept, who am I to tell you to stop? This is a topic we bear upon in the Barbell Rehab Workshop.

self myofascial release tools

Just be careful though. Information technology is like shooting fish in a barrel to go down the rabbit hole with these interventions. In other words, while five minutes of self-myofascial release (SMR) may assist initially, you may eventually demand 30 minutes down the road to become the same desired event.

Your body can adapt very quickly to these interventions. And so while they may help yous feel better in the curt-term, they aren't long term solutions and they aren't necessary for a successful effect.

A Notation on Direct Pressure on Tendons

Aggravating factors may also occur exterior of the gym setting. In general, tendinopathies are aggravated past too much direct pressure.

For a triceps tendinopathy, this includes sitting for prolonged periods of time with your elbow resting on a hard desk-bound or the center console in your car while driving.

If yous're having elbow pain and having a difficult time getting it to calm downwards, I'd try and limit direct pressure on information technology outside the gym also.

Tying information technology All Together

As with whatsoever tendinopathy, the main goal is to temporarily modify or avoid the aggravating factor, and then slowly build your tolerance support to information technology. If you're dealing with elbow hurting during the bench press hither's what I'd practice:

First, endeavour widening your grip, decreasing the load, and performing a tempo bench press. This volition assistance offload the triceps a chip only will still go on to arm-twist a training consequence.
If you're having hurting at just one function of the ROM, temporarily remove that part and train a suitable variation (either a flooring press or a bench press with a soft lockout).
Dose in exercises similar the alternating dumbbell bench presses or shoulder taps to provide an isometric stimulus to the triceps tendon. This tin help reduce pain.
Once the pain is tolerable, add an isolation do like the underhand triceps extension or banded triceps pushdown in social club to force an accommodation and build tendon capacity.

If you're someone dealing with elbow pain during the bench press, the tips above will help y'all overcome it.

If you're more of a auditory learner, cheque out the video below. This is office of our Whiteboard Wednesday YouTube Series, where every week, we talk about a different subject related to pain and operation!