Sebastian Brosche · 3 min · 583 words
Previously titled: The Elbow Rotator Cuff
Joel Kreska, sport physiotherapist here. Now we've recently been talking about mobility of the elbow, either in a bent position or a straight position into pronation. It's absolutely vital that we do that to help garner mobility that we can then utilize for strength of the rotator cuff of the elbow. This is important for both tennis elbow or lateral elbow pain, golfer's elbow, medial elbow pain, or just we want to regain mobility and strength as well as grip strength, hint, hint, uh, is any of these, we have to strengthen the rotator cuff.
Okay. So the rotator cuff of the elbow dictates strength of the forearm and grip. Okay. So if there's no anchor, all the work that you may do down here for grip strength will turn to nothing.
And if you're having pain with gripping, I highly recommend you go back and check the mobility of your pronation as well as supination. But again, most people have stiffness into pronation and what we're going to go over right now. So once I have full mobility in a bent elbow and a straight elbow into pronation, I have to start to strengthen the supinator muscles. So those are the muscles that go from palm down to palm up as if I'm going to hold a bowl of soup and no, that's not where it comes from.
It's just a good, easy way to remember. So first thing I want to do is I want to keep my elbow pinned to my side and shoulder back with good posture. I'm then going to rotate all the way around from palm down to palm up. It's important, especially when you're first learning that you pivot over your pinky finger so that you start to lengthen the band as you do it versus hook underneath my thumb, which is actually doing nothing.
And you'd be amazed how many people do that. So early on, if you need to, you just rest your pinky on your knee, good posture. And we're going to rotate into a palm up position and back slow and controlled. As that becomes easier and easier with high reps, the goal is just trying to do it with a straight elbow.
And again, I want to keep good posture, straight elbow. I'm going to rotate over my pinky and back slow and controlled. It's really important when you're doing this, that you don't see any wrist extension or finger flaring or anything like that. Those are just compensatory movements that are not helpful in the long-term.
So again, before you try to strengthen the rotator cuff, make sure you've got good flexibility. And then after we've done this, this rotator cuff strengthening, we can start to get into some pretty neat exercises for developing grip strength. And if you have pain from any of these things, just make sure you slow it down quite a bit. These ones take time, especially with considering how much gripping we do.
We need to start very, very slow and build it up. If you've had an acute elbow injury, whether dislocation or arm bar, make sure you've got slow gradual range of motion returning and then slow gradual strength. Improving from a bent position all the way out to straight. And once we've done that, we're going to go over some new things here pretty quick.
I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you on the mat soon. Have a good one.
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