Bill shows three manual techniques to relieve ulnar nerve entrapment, which causes golfer's elbow, weak grip, and pinky numbness. Each involves specific arm and shoulder positions kept below 3/10 intensity. Retest grip strength after each set to find which technique works best for you.
If elbow pain, wrist pain, or grip strength are limiting your day-to-day activities or your workouts, then you'll want to try this. Hi, I'm Bill, owner of beyondfitnessonline.com, and today we're going to be talking about something called the ulnar nerve. Now, the ulnar nerve comes from the neck, down the shoulder, right here around the elbow, into the little finger right here. And can play a huge role in all kinds of things like grip strength, typing, uh, can have a role in golfer's elbow. So there's a lot of different things that this could be affecting. And what I'm going to teach you today is how to tension and floss that nerve. Now, before we get to that, if you haven't already, please go ahead and subscribe to the channel so you get all my updates every single week. And let's get started. So you know that the ulnar nerve is a problem for you if you have something like golfer's elbow, Or you have weak flexion in your wrist, you have some numbness in your pinky, particularly on the palm side, you may have some grip strength issues. If that sounds like you, then we're going to want to try this. Now, with the nerve, the nerve comes out of the spine up in the lower part of the neck, and it can get entrapped in any spot along the way, usually in one of the joints along the way. That it goes down to the hand, but basically it can also get scar tissue around it or just get stuck. And what we want to do is we want to try and free that up so that it can move properly the way it's supposed to. Now nerves do actually move through the muscles a little bit, and if they get stuck, they get a different signal and you get all kinds of problems. So there's 3 different things that we can do for this. There's tensioning the nerve, there's slacking the nerve, and there's flossing the nerve, and I'm going to go through each one of those. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to tension the ulnar nerve, and I'm going to take you step by step with this. Now, when we do this, it's really, really important to understand that when you measure the intensity of this on a scale of 1 to 10, this is your own judgment, you shouldn't go more intense than like a 3. Keep it very mild. It's kind of a weird stretch. You might get a little bit of a tingly feeling, and if you do, that's good enough. You don't need to push this one too hard because you can actually cause more problems than helping it. So here's what we do. The first thing you're gonna do is you're gonna take your hand and make big fingers like this. So you wanna make sure the fingers stay extended, okay? As best you can. If you have some issue and this is the best you can do, that's fine. Keep it extended. You also wanna extend the wrist, okay? Then you're going to bend the elbow. So it's as if you're carrying a tray, like if you were a waiter, if you were a server, okay? Then you're going to move the arm out just a little bit. Now, usually by this point, people start to feel a little something up in here. If you don't, that's fine. Keep going. The next step is to take this shoulder and you want to kind of drop that shoulder down. Okay? If you still are not at a 3 out of 10, then what you're going to want to do is tilt your head away from your hand. Now from here, you can just hold it or you can pump one of these joints. Okay? You don't have to do all of them. Just pick one, move it about 5 to 10 times, and then come out of that nice and slow. And then see how that feels. You can retest. The sensation or your grip strength or your flexion strength. See if this feels any better. Any of those would be a good sign. So if we take that one step further, we may need to actually floss that nerve. So what we do is we get back in that same position. So again, we extend, extend, flex the elbow, come out, shoulder down, and remember, stop wherever you were. And I'm going to tilt my head. Now, from here, I can come and take one end away. So I'm just going to flex my wrist. Now, on the other end of the nerve where my head is, I'm going to go here and go back to that extension there, and then come back here. So we're literally taking that nerve right now and flossing it back and forth. And sometimes that's what it takes to break free from any impingement. The last thing I want to show you is how to slack the nerve. Now, sometimes tensioning the nerve Is not what we need. We need the opposite, and it's hard to tell unless you try one and then the other and see which one works better. So what we're going to do is do the exact opposite of what we did when we were tensioning it. So we're going to make a fist, we're going to flex the wrist down, we're going to extend the arm out, we're going to bring it across the body, we're going to go shoulder up and tilt your head in. And you're just going to hold this for about 30 seconds. After about 30 seconds, just come out of it nice and slow, and then see if the sensation is better. If the wrist flexion is stronger, if the pain is gone, whatever your issue is, try that out and see if it's improved it. Now usually you'll only need one of these three techniques to fix whatever's going on in that ulnar nerve, and try them all out. See what works for you. Leave me a note below in the comments and tell me what worked best for you. If you have any questions, I'd love to have a conversation with you. And until next time. Until next time, live healthy.
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