Hey guys, welcome to this week’s Wellness Wednesday. This week, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about working with your own aches and pains at home, specifically working with elbow and wrist pain. I know we don’t have the best weather out today, but we have been kind of graced with some beautiful outdoor weather, and with our current pandemic situation, I know that means that a lot of people have been hitting the golf course, hitting the tennis courts and spending as much time as they can outside. And oftentimes getting back into these activities, means that you’re going to be more prone to experiencing elbow and wrist pain. And a lot of it has to do with just pure overuse of muscles. And I think that’s something that not a lot of people are familiar with or aware of. And fortunately, that means that it’s actually pretty easy to be working with at home in conjunction with care that you’re getting with your healthcare professionals.
So with a lot of the situations that people experience, if we’re working with say, tennis elbow or golfer’s elbow, which are just common names of these aches and pains, like tendonitis of the elbow, we’re working with these large muscle groups in the forearm here. And I apologize, I’m wearing black here today, which makes us a little bit harder to see, but we’re working with the large muscle groups in the forearm that do a lot of the work here. We see this with carpenters as well, or people who do a lot of work at home, with like using screwdrivers, things like that, because these muscles in our forearm, as we use them, they get tight just like any other muscle in the body. But the thing is when they’re smaller like this, they can fatigue out easier, especially again, if they’re not used to being used as frequently or as aggressively as we tend to just jump into our activities now, like say golf, tennis, home repairs, as a lot of people are doing right now home projects.
And when that happens, when muscles get tired really quickly like that, they tend to get really tight and can kind of spasm. The thing is we don’t typically feel muscle tightness or muscle spasms right in the belly of the muscle or the heart of the muscle, we feel that at the points that the muscle is attached to the bones, which in this case are going to be either at the elbow or at the wrist. And that’s why we tend to feel it as pain in the elbow or the wrist. And so a lot of times it will feel like a deep ache in there. Sometimes it can be kind of sharp if it is like when you move certain directions, it’ll be kind of like a twinge. Either way, one of the best things that you can do is kind of poke around into these muscles here and when you find a spot that kind of feels like that deep ache in there, kind of like a hurt so good, you hold into that muscle and then you just kind of move the arm, move the hand.
And that’s a way to do trigger point work. Another really good way, is actually if you take a Dixie cup, fill it with water and freeze it so that you’ve got a hard edge of ice. Take that and just kind of work it into the muscle with that hard edge of ice so that you can do muscle work simultaneously with getting the inflammation or the swelling out of that muscle. Because with that, anytime you’re doing muscle work, you’re going to be building up or releasing some inflammation or swelling from that muscle. So when you do icing with it, at the same time you’re getting that inflammation out too, which is also helpful.
And when you use like an ice cube or like a brick of ice like that versus an ice pack, moist cold gets a lot deeper into the tissue than dry cold does. So when you’re using like a Dixie cup filled with water frozen like that, you only need a couple of minutes of work onto the tissue like that versus an ice pack where it’s usually recommended 15 to 20 minutes to get the adequate icy and that cool burning, achy, numb effect. When you go in to see your healthcare provider, they’re going to actually be able to get mobilization into the joints that tend to kind of lock up when you have that increased tension in the muscles there as well. And that’s kind of the next step in really getting that full range of motion throughout all of the joints. But getting into those muscles yourself is really, really, really helpful.
A couple of stretches that are also helpful are if you bring your arm out like this, pull your hand back and then bringing your arm down. And if you notice I’m not just pulling my arm down here because it can stretch or put too much strain on the wrist, so I like to bring and hold and kind of cut my wrist here and then same up here too. And again, you want to be kind of listening to your body with all of these things. It’s always going to be kind of like a hurt so good as your limit. And again, still listening to your body and that there’s always that saying no pain, no gain. To be honest, if you’re going beyond that hurt so good into just hurt, you’re not really doing anything for yourself. That hurt so good of like, “Okay, I can feel this. It kind of hurts, but it feels good. I’m not quite ready to stop working on it.” That’s a good place to be. Anything beyond that, you’re just hurting the tissue and it’s not really going to be helping much.
So, that’s my recommendation for elbow and wrist pain for now. And I hope it helps any aches and pains you guys might be feeling with some of those beautiful weather. Catch you guys later. Bye.