Tendonitis and weight-lifting: It's a (literal) pain

As I get older just like almost everyone else, I am susceptible to a great many injuries that I was previously kind of immune to. When I was in my teens until my mid-30's I almost considered myself invincible because I had been in a great many situations where people normally would get injured or even break bones, yet I just kind of shook it off. I thought for a while that I might have been like Bruce Willis' character in Unbreakable. Well fast-forward 10-20 years and I have come to the stark realization that I am in fact, not unbreakable, and I suffer from a lot of things that plague most people my age.

I do not use this as an excuse to stop exercising though, as many people do. I want exercise to be a regular part of my life because I am stubborn and I also don't want to be fat. This is quite annoying particularly when it comes to weight-lifting though.

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About 2 years ago I started to experience pain in my primary (right) arm around the bicep and elbow area. This is really annoying because just like with most men, I want to have biceps that "pop." It is a favorite body part to work out so when I all of a sudden started to feel like I can't or shouldn't exercise that part of my body, I was convinced I would power through.

I first noticed it during hammer curls, which do a decent job of isolating the bicep without additional equipment.

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I used to quite easily hammer-curl 15kg and would taper off to 10kg in drop sets. One day I started off with my trusty 15's only to discover great discomfort in my right arm. The following day it was even worse. Not wanting to simply stop doing bicep stuff I kept on doing them using the "no pain no gain" mantra, but as you get older this is a really fantastic way to end up with chronic pain.

So what can you do? Unfortunately there is no real way to cure this so if you want to continue to strengthen the bicep you are going to have to do something to alleviate the pain. For me, this consisted of doing higher amounts of reps at lower weights which I do not like to do because it is more time consuming but it is better than being in pain for the rest of the time because you want to HULK SMASH the weights.

Another thing that you can do is to attempt to relieve some of the pain by some simple things you can do at home.

This next video is made by a chiropractor and sorry to any chiropractors out there, but I have no respect for your profession and think you are all a bunch of quacks who couldn't get real MD's so you did the community college version of it. Despite my disdain for chiropractors, this physio method of alleviating pain has worked pretty well for me.

Obviously if you have access to a competent doctor it would always be wise to consult them rather than listening to me or anyone else on the internet for that matter. Everyone's body is a bit different so what works for me could actually be damaging to you. Just know that the things I mention above allowed me to both continue working my biceps and also alleviate the pain I would feel if I overdid it. Weight lifting and especially bodybuilding is all about overworking muscle groups and this can be very difficult to accomplish with tendonitis.

See if it works for you!

_{I have no educational background for the things I say here. What I do have is 20 years of experience and a lot of that experience was by doing things wrong the first time around. My hope is that people out there can learn from my mistakes and never make them on their own}