Ben Greenfield describes recurring forearm and elbow pain from activities (pull-ups, rope climbing, axe-swinging, and typing) and explains that common self-treatment tools (foam rollers, muscle sticks, lacrosse/tennis/golf balls, myo rope) were ineffective. He demonstrates and recommends a device called the "arm aid," showing how to attach it to the leg, trap the forearm/elbow between balls and a roller, and use hand rotation and opening/closing to work deep tissue. He offers a link on his site for viewers to check the product.
Hey, it's Ben Greenfield here. And I gotta tell you, with all the hardcore activities that I do on a daily basis, and that includes chopping wood out in my backyard, doing pull ups in the comfort of my own home.
And of course.
Typing on my computer, I tend to get forearm pain right in there, sometimes on the outside of the elbow too. And I found that in the forearm, the elbow, and the arm in general. It can be really hard to work on this area with traditional deep tissue type of methods. For example, for a while, for the pain in my elbow and forearms generated by pull ups and swinging an axe and typing on the computer, I tried foam rolling, lying down in a foam roller and trying to get the foam roller to get rid of some of the soft tissue adhesions of my arm. Foam roller doesn't work that well. For that, you're going to find even these special rollers with the rumbles and the ridges on them, you have a hard time getting your elbow to dig into that tissue. Then I tried the stick, muscle stick like this. The problem with the muscle stick is it works really well if you have two hands to hold on to it to work deep tissue. But once you're limited to just one hand, it's really hard to get enough pressure against that tissue. I've tried setting these sticks down on tables and hard surfaces and kind of rolling my arm on them like that, but that doesn't seem to work all that well either. It simply doesn't pinch the arm enough. And then I've also tried balls. You can get lacrosse balls, tennis balls, golf balls, things like that, and try and get them to wrap around the muscle tissue, wrap around the muscle area. But again, it's very difficult. Even with this one's called a myo rope. Even trying to attach this and get it to go up and down the muscle, it's just really hard to get good arm work for your elbows. This is kind of a newer problem for me because I've recently started doing fewer triathlons and more spartan races. So I'm climbing ropes more, climbing rocks more, doing more pull ups. And when you put that together with all of my axe swinging and my typing, my arms are taking a hit. I've had to deal with this lately, so I want to show you this strange contraption that I figured out how to use. This one's called an arm aid. An arm aid. And I thought this was like the cheesiest thing ever when I saw the ad for it, because it was like this made for TV thing, but it actually I got this from my local rock climbing facility. What you do is you just attach it to your leg like so. Once you've got it attached to your leg, you stick your arm in there. Now, my arm is trapped between these balls on this side and this little roller on the other side. And when I roll my arm up and down like this, it removes all those adhesions in the forearm. But I can also find an area of tight tissue right here in the epicondyle of the elbow. I can trap it and then rotate my hand from side to side, as well as open and close my hand. And it works all of that deep tissue. So I know it's kind of a funky looking device, but I wanted to shoot this video because I get a lot of people writing in to me about forearm pain, carpal tunnel, elbow pain, and a lot of times it's active people who are also having to work on computers, which is exactly what I do. Right. I type a lot and I also use my arms in the weight room, so it's called an arm aid. I'll put a link to it for you@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Armade so you can check it out. But I actually do recommend this now if you are somebody who does upper body work and it also works on your computer. So check it out. And I hope this was helpful for you if you have elbow pain.
