[lukeh]

Hi everyone,

I've been doing palm down wrist curls to help with tennis elbow for a while now, which seems to help.

I recently had a chat with a physio (over beer so not in a huge amount of detail) who mentioned that the beneficial stage of the exercise is when the weight is being lowered, and that I should then raise the weight with my other arm before starting another rep.

I've done a couple of sets like this and can't really say I noticed the difference. 

Any knowledge on the matter would be appreciated, but I guess some specific points would be:

Whether raising the weight can be detrimental,
Whether the physio was right in that beneficial part of the curl is lowering the weight,
and more generally what sort of range of reps this exercise should be using (I normally go to 20, which will result in failure after a few sets...).

Cheers

[chris05]

If you search the site there is loads on this (search for tennis elbow or eccentric curls). This article is good: http://www.athlon.com.au/articles/r&i_dodgyelbow.pdf

[LB1782]

As I understand it, the idea is that: performing just the eccentric part of the movement preferentially targets the connective tissues over the muscles.

[douglas]

I thought that the weights needed to be sufficiently heavy that there's no way to lift with just one hand and lowering under control is all that can be managed. That's how I've always done rehab curls. I usually do 3 sets of 8 but that's for no particular reason.

[highrepute]

the literature is fairly agreed that eccentric exercise is the best way to recover  from injury. So in this case the lowering is the important bit. There are arguements for not doing the lift to avoid incurring any repetitive strain type injuries. I think 3 sets of 10 reps is usually recommmended but I'm not really aware of the reasons for this. All this is mentioned in the athlon article I believe.

Weight wise, I didn't think using a large weight was needed, and a physio did tell me that using a light weight (4kg-ish?)would be fine.

You might want to read this http://ukbouldering.com/board/index.php/topic,10847.msg182899.html#msg182899

[slackline]

[Duncan Disorderly]

Here's Ozzy's vid, pretty much doing these everyday but he's told me to do up to 15 and get the weight so I just can't do the last rep (up to around 5 Kg)...



Definitely helping but the 4 weeeks off of pulling even remotely hard (and I couldn't pull that hard in the first place) is driving me nuts!!!

:D

[krymson]

I had elbow issues a while ago and ever since doing eccentrics and some proper tricep work regularly it seems to have gone away.

One weird phenomenon I encounter with eccentric curls is that when i do them these days  I actually experience aggravation in the wrist(carpal tunnel?) area rather than the medial epicondyle.

has anyone else experienced this?

My completely uneducated guess is that my elbow is healthy now, and the weak link is now my wrists, from computer use and crushing(is what i tell myself) slopers.

Even with the wrist the eccentrics seem to be working because each week i have to increase the weight for the same amount of aggravation.