Shooter's Elbow - Tennis Elbow - Golfer's Elbow: Anatomy, Technique & the Tool to Relieve

Shooter’s Elbow is a catch-all term that describes tendinitis pain on either the inside (golfer's), outside (tennis) of the elbow or perhaps both sides at the same time! From a shooter's perspective, tight muscles and hurting elbows keep one from shooting as much or as accurately as one would like.

There is no mystery as to the root of the problem, and the solution is simple. 

Anatomy 101 - How problems start:

One uses the muscles of the forearm, both flexors (inside) and extensors (outside) to grip, grasp and hold onto your firearm, particularly when pistol shooting.  It's tough on these muscles when arms, hands, and fingers are repeatedly frozen and locked for several seconds in mid-air, round after round. 

Increased overuse problems can develop the more time spent on the range – the more you make your forearm muscles do, the tighter and more shortened those muscles get.    

Through chronic overuse, muscles in the forearm can remain tight and incessantly pull on their tendon attachments in and around the elbow and through the wrist into the hand. This tight pulling muscle/tendon irritation causes inflammation at the attachment point. Hence the name tendonitis: inflammation of the tendon.  

Simply stated, chronically tight forearm muscles are the reason you have tendinitis. To describe this root cause of tendinitis, PTs and the sports medicine therapy world call it '’loss of range of motion.”  

Luckily, there is a simple way to regain your muscle's range of motion and regain your muscles’ natural levels of strength and endurance and relieve the pain.


The Solution:

It's all about doing the right muscle-release technique really well.

There is a supremely efficient sports medical massage technique that is the absolute best in regaining range of motion. There are several names for virtually the same simple-to-do technique: active release, tack and stretch, myofascial release, and trigger point therapy, to name some of them.   


Here’s the technique:  

  1. Find a sore spot, (trigger point) somewhere on the forearm extensor muscle (the outside forearm big muscle that goes from elbow to the wrist).
  2. Hold pressure directly on that sore spot.  Hold pressure so you have a “hurts good” feeling, "OOOooo right there!"
  3. While continuing to put pressure on the spot, move your hand slowly up and down and all around at the wrist. This will stretch the muscle that you have under pressure.    

By combining pressure and movement, one is able to break down the muscle adhesions that keep muscles tight. Remember to always put enough pressure on the sore spots to create that good feeling. 

Using this technique one starts to regain range of motion immediately and will feel good even after the first session!   


Optimize your recovery: Find a tool to apply the technique!

As incredible as this technique is, just using your hand to do the massage by itself gets exhausting and reduces how effective the technique can be. So, you need a tool that can take over part of the work your hand has been doing.

For a tool that doesn’t cost anything, you can use a big rock, soup can, brick or dumbbell, as long as the tool has mass and can be guided by the free hand onto those sore trigger points.

Or you can use Armaid. Armaid is a leverage-based tool designed to easily increase your power, stamina, and ability to apply as much pressure as wanted to release tight muscles.  Armaid has 5 separate therapy attachments for types of arm, wrist or hand issues.

Perform the technique as often as you brush your teeth:  2 to 3 minutes, 2 to 3 times a day.   

A little knowledge coupled with the right therapy action means liberation from the effects of muscle overuse and frees one to shoot as much or as accurately as one would like.

In this case ‘Gun Control' means healthy and fully functioning arm muscles!   

Best of health and accurate and healthy shooting everyone!