Mark Rippetoe's chin-up protocol for fixing Golfers Elbow

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sannya

New member
I'm writing this post to recommend Rippetoe's chin-up protocol as a fix for Golfers Elbow. I was super sceptical of this at first because it seems so counter intuitive, especially compared to most other information out there.

For those of you unaware of what I'm talking about, Rippetoe suggests a high volume chin-up protocol with 2-3 reps per set for a large amount of sets (15 -20) and repeating every 5 days.

I have been dealing with Golfers elbow from incorrect pullup technique (over flexing of the wrists to get higher over the bar) for about 6 months and have tried many things, including daily high rep tyler twists on a flex bar. The tyler twists seem to fix the pain but as soon as I tried to do pullups again the pain quickly returned.

I came across this video
where Rip discusses the protocol, and out of desperation gave it a go.

I switched from pullups to chin-ups and made sure my form was spot on (wrists unflexed and elbows driving down to my sides). I did them slowly with an especially slow eccentric.

The first couple of times I did this it hurt like crazy for the first 5 sets and then the pain would go away. It would return once I was done and cooled down but then after about a day of rest it would feel great. After doing the routine for about a month the pain slowly turned into a dull ache and now about 2 months later has almost completely disappeared.

I can't recommend this enough. Has anyone else had experience with this?
 
@sannya This is interesting. I wonder if the same principles can be applied to knee pain.

Edit: Nvm just watched it, that's exactly what he talked about. Thanks for this!
 
@redverse Its been well established that eccentric loading of muscles is the way to address subacute tendonitis and chronic tendonopathy. This protocol works with patellar (knee) tendonitis, plantar fasciitis, golfers/tennis elbow, and even surpaspinatus tears.

The trick is finding a way to put just enough load on the target muscle(s) to elicit the formation of long, mobile scar tissue, without creating new infammation.

Ironically the mechanism of injury is the same as the protocol of repair, just at lower loads/volumes.

Rippetoe's protocol works well for the demographic he works with, but weaker people need to use way less than their bodyweight. Easiest way to do this wouild be doing supine grip pulldowns on elastics or a cable stack, with a slow eccentric phase.
 
@talaribhushanam1976 Thanks that’s a good point. The main thing that surprised me about this was the fact that I had to work through a fair bit of pain which is contrary to most information on tendinitis I have found out there.
 
@sannya Pain is attention grabbing for a reason. In this case it is meant as a check against overload.

In some cases, pain can be safely 'ignored' or worked through.

However, since these kinds of tendonopathies are correlated with inflammation of the tissues involved, pain signaling to the brain will elicit an inflammatory response.

Excess inflammation is already part of the problem. It will inhibit the formation of healthy scar tissue, as the tissue remodelling process never has a change to progress out of the acute phase.
 
@sannya What kinda intense? I did this today and my the tendons in my forearms feel stretched and painful. The pain seems to be mostly from the load bearing/stretch. Did you experience the same?
 
@sannya Thanks. Will let you know. I also feel pain roughly where the long head of bicep is supposed to be. Does this protocol work to fix that kind of tendinopathy too?
 
@talaribhushanam1976 One possibility for weaker people is to use assisted chin-ups with a resistance band.

Or, and I'm thinking out loud with a plan to do this (I have a brachialis injury to tend to) to climb on a chair or bench while setting themselves at the top of the chin-up exercise.

Then, engage the core, and lift one knee off the chair/bench. Then, lift the other, then slowly lower themselves down from the top of the chin-up position. That'd be one eccentric rep.

So we could, perhaps, do this as a variation of Rippetoe's protocol, doing 2-3 reps eccentrically this way for recovery.
 
@redverse Yeah, my knee tendon on the inside (don’t know the name) hurt during squats a couple months ago and I noticed that when I focused on keeping my foot archer an my knees pushed outside even more than I was already doing it didn’t hurt that much. So I focused on that for a couple weeks and used every occasion in which I had to stand up from a chair as squat technique training and in a few weeks the pain was pretty much gone. Now the pattern has been set and I move like that all the time.
 
@sister_diane Ironically, the other day I was midsquat and thought, "Why am I not pushing my legs out?" Everything felt much smoother after that. Now just gotta turn it into habit.
 
@merrily234 Was going to recommend him. He’s great. A lot of his principles come from rehab techniques, so they definitely work. I used them on my college basketball players and it worked really one. One of my guys playing overseas uses his exercises all the time to keep tendinitis at bay. He used to always have tendinitis, now it doesn’t bother him.
 
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