Pain can be a result of improper form, especially when it comes to elbow pain during push ups.
We may be rocking out on our hands, lifting our thumbs up off the ground, or letting our elbows flare way up by our shoulders.
Both of these can lead to overload that results in elbow pain.
But what if your push up form looks spot on and you’re still feeling that annoying, nagging elbow pain after your push up workouts?
Elbow Pain With Push Ups? Do This!
What’s going on and what can you do to fix it? Often injuries are a sign that an area has become overloaded and overworked. And in the case of our elbows, this can actually happen because of immobility or instability at our wrist or shoulders.
Because of a lack of mobility or stability at one of these two other joints, our body compensates to mimic that proper looking movement pattern.
So often the more advanced we are, the more we can “hide” improper recruitment patterns behind proper form.
If you lack proper wrist extension during push ups, you will seek out the mobility you need further up your arm to still replicate that movement.
Not to mention you’ll
end up overusing muscles in an attempt to still stabilize and perform the movement without the proper mobility to engage muscles correctly.
It’s why you may find if you do a push up with a mat under the heel of your palm or a neutral grip push up off of stands or on your knuckles, the elbow pain goes away.
Same principle applies to shoulder issues. Shoulder mobility and stability issues can also lead to elbow overload during push ups.
It’s why you may even find trying to use proper form hurts worse than letting your elbows flare up by your shoulders and your hands turn in.
It’s also why you may be able to work around pain by using a closer grip push up as it requires less mobility and scapular control.
But as much as we DO want to use variations and modifications to work around our pain, we need to address the underlying causes. This helps us prevent future injury and even allows us to do all of the fun moves out there instead of feeling limited!
That’s why I wanted to share this amazing mobility series you can do as part of your warm up before your push up workout. It’s 3 moves to include prior and can literally just take 2 minutes.
This quick series will help you improve your wrist extension and shoulder and scapular mobility and stability so your elbows don’t suffer the consequences during push ups of issues at these other two joints!
