I’ve used Mag-10 with great results in the past bu unfortuneatly my training combined with rapid increases in strenght contributed to mty developing an extremely bad case of tennis elbow. I’ve tried everyhting except an extended layoff. Would Mag-10 help one to retain muscle during a 4-6 month layoff? Would anything else help?
Your MAG-10 usage/strength gains don’t have anything to do with your tennis elbow (or any other kind of tendonitis). More likely the culprit is one or a combination of the following:
- Using the same movements for too long without cycling off
- Insufficient warm-up
- Little or no “prehab” work
- Lacking some area of nutrition
My advice would be first, to check out the “Cure for Tendonitis” article in the T-mag archives. Second, start incorporating pre-hab movements in your warm-up/warm-down every time you go to the gym. Third, change your routine up. Fourth, invest in some Wobenzym and start taking it 45 minutes before meals.
If these don’t have you showing a huge imporvement in about two weeks, then you should check with a sports doc and see what he says.
HTH.
Thanks for your input char…I think you are dead on in your assesment but unfortunately I have exhauseted almost every option (including ART) but an extended break because I was to stubborn to listen to my body when I still had some control of the situation. I think that the negatives only routine or even typing for that matter, is not good for this particular injury-it just needxs rest. Also I did not mean to pass the buck for my tennis elbow on mag-10 as 99.% was preventable and due to my choice of training. I have already ordered some Wobenzym as well as some of that horse joint lintamint. I ice and stretch, but my main concern is how to maintIn muscle during AT LEAST a 3 month layoff and maybe even 6. Seriously, I love to workout as mmuch as anyone but this crap has been going on for months and I have decided to bite the bullet and let this injury heal once and for all.
Not to belabor the obvious, but have you actually given the negatives-only option a shot? It doesn’t sound like it to me. I ask because it’s easy to try a set, find out that it hurts a bit, think that this pain is exacerbating the condition (when it’s actually not) and quit without giving the cure a chance to work.
If you do the routine, it will cause you a bit of pain. Drop the weight until it’s somewhat painful but not debilitating. Then purposely seek out that level of pain when you do the movement. After a week or so, you should experience a significant lessening of the pain and be able to raise the weight a bit. And after a while you’ll be back to full strength.
The other tricky thinkg about the neg routine is that you sometimes have to be a little creative with your movement in order to get at the problem area. If you have pain during a bench press, for example, doing negative benches may not be the best option for curing it. So you might have to play around a little to see what works best.
I have not tried it as exactly described in the article because I wasn’t convinced it was applicable to a forearm/elbow/bracioradialis (side of elbow)injury as opposed to tendonitis of the elbow specifcally (back of the elbow). My pain does not come from pushing movements (bench) as much as it does from pulling/rowing, curling or gripping exercises. I rationalized that since it was not improveing with the substatial modifications I had already incorporated into my routine that more work, in this specific instance, was not the answer (but I could be wrong). I also talked to another guy at the gym who had suffered with the same condidtion and he informed me that the only cure for him was 6 months of NO lifting. BTW I developed this condition from pulling/curling movements (and HEAVY lateral raisesas) as opposed to pressing or pushing movements. So do you think I should try the negatives routine or continue with my layoff?
I think that you should try the negatives routine. Absolutely.
If you do a search under my name here and look for threads related to tendonitis (which will absolutely SUCK using the current search engine, but Tampa Terry has posted a great work-around on the Tech Forums, using Google), you’ll see that a couple of years ago I was suffering from tendonitis very similar to yours in both elbows. (In fact, it sounds exactly the same.) I tried everything I could think of - magnets, linament, rest, different exercises, massage, stretching, acupuncture, you name it - and only three things had any effect at all.
One was using an elastic strap to give myself a sort of “accupressure” at the affected point. That actually helped quite a bit on my left arm (although it wasn’t a total cure, and had no effect at all on my right).
Two was Wobenzym.
Three was the negatives, which resulted in dramatic improvement within about ten days. By “dramatic”, I mean that about 90% of the pain vanished. The remaining bit was also cured using negatives, but it took me a while to find out just how to structure a negative to hit the right area.
Give it a shot, bud. Seriously. If it doesn’t work for you, you can still take that six months (ouch!) off in a couple of weeks.
This thread has helped me, and things are deffinitely looking up because: 1) I Just received an ART treatment from a practionar who is ALOT closer to my house and he advised me that a long layoff would NOT cause my injury to get better. B/c he’s closer I will be able to get in more and better schedule ART appointments. 2) The Wobenzym just arrived at my house. 3) I got some great feedback from you and others about this injury. I will try the negatives routine (a negative reverse curl would hit my specific injury). Two quick questions for you char…1) How much Wobenzym did you take and 2) what specific exercise did you use for your negatives (I will search for your other threads too). BTW thanks a ton for your help.
Super, I took two tablets before each meal, so that’d be about 12 per day. I don’t think that there’s any real worry about ODing on them, lol.
As for the exercises, I don’t really remember, to tell you the truth. It’s been a while. I do seem to recall setting something up with a strap-loop and doing one-arm negatives using a sort of “low pulley row” type of movement on the cable crossover machine. But that’s about it. (I know that there were a lot more movements that I tried, though.)
The thing is to try and find something that causes you pain, then take a moderate weight - not something so heavy that you start screaming - and do negatives. The pain should lessen dramatically after a week or two.
My tendonitis eventually got so bad that I was really limited in what I could do. Pretty much any kind of pulling motion hurt, whether it was low rows, upright rows, curls, you name it. So at the beginning it wasn’t difficult to find exercises to do negatives with. But then as I got better, it became something of a challenge to find exercises that would really get in there and target that last remaining little bit of adhesion to achieve a full recovery. (And you do want a full recovery…) So you may have to get creative, twisting your arm as you go through the motion (like on a Zottman curl), whatever it takes.
Also, your ART guy is right; tendonitis doesn’t usually respond well to lay-offs, at least within my experience.
Also, you’re welcome. 