thrower's elbow surgery

[petsku]

Does anyone have experiences of elbow surgery? How fast elbow has heeled after disinsertion?

[slinger]

perhaps someone can give JB a buzz for his thoughts?

[Administrator]

I had elbow surgery a few years ago, I was throwing again at full pressure within 6 months after a lot of hard rehab.

[dobster]

Depends on the type of surgery you have - Tommy John Surgery (UCL reconstruction) can take around 18 months to fully heal. I think Dan Carter had a minor elbow Op and he was reasonbly ' elbow' fit within a few months.

[wez]

I think Dans OP was mostly a cleanup job of lots of old bust-up stuff in the joint, he still wasnt throwing by the end of the season though. I think he said he could throw but not fully- only around 50m efforts.

Petsku, i'm sure you will be back in buisness before next season- just follow the rehab work religiously and things should be fine. Our own 'bionic man' James Everard has come back from all kinds of nasty hurts so if he think 6 months then i guess thats about right.

[petsku]

my surgery was quite small - tendon dissinsertion, clean up and attach. I'm just wondering if everything is normal, because it has got sore after good heeling in beginning. Perhaps I have just started to do rehabs with too heavy loads. My surgeon said that it is normal that elbow is sore for about 3 months after surgery but I am still little worried, because it was already better and pain has worsen.

James, what kind of rehab did you do? Was there any pain in your exercises?

[Administrator]

Hi Petsku,

After my operation there was a lot of muscle wastage and of course a real decrease in the range of motion. To try and build up the muscle size again I started very slowly with simple exercises like gripping - first a soft ball, then a gripping machine. I focussed a lot on the forearm muscles on the inside of my arm too - so lots of curls at the wrist bringing the palm of my hand towards the inside of my elbow. (I also balanced this with the opposite action - going from flexed to extended at the wrist to focus on the forearm musces leading from the back of my hand).

Once I was stronger and more confident in my grip and capabilities of my lower arm I started to build the biceps principally and triceps to balance. Again I started very light and always used dumbells in a standing position rather than using a preacher curl machine for example which I felt uncomfartable with.

By the time all of my arms muscles were strengthened sufficiently (around 4-5 weeks of focussing on those muscle groups) I started including some light rotation in the exercises, i.e. hammer curls for the biceps and some rotation t the elbow of the lower arm with a fixed wrist.

I also found it useful to do some shoulder rehab exercises. Although the focus of these exercises is for the rotator cuff, I found the emphasis on keeping the elbow in a fixed position helped a lot for the stability for the joint.

Initially before throwing I used a pulley system to slowly mimic the throwing action for a couple of weeks. After around 10 weeks of rehab I started doing this and then after a few more weeks I started to lightly throw tennis balls with a very high arm and very gently. I then progressed to cricket balls and by the time it came to javelin throwing started with 400, 500 and 600g javs.

The main prinicipal was to only ever do things I felt comfartable with and let my body tell me when to stop. The range of motion increased gradually and perhaps if I had have focussed more on stretching it would have returned closer to normal than it is now.

My injury was similar, with some minor work to the tendon and also some removal of bone which was trapping the ulnar nerve so I would imagine the rehab could follow a similar path. Unfortunately I had no real advice on rehab so the ideas I used are very simple but seemed to be very effective and have left my arm in a better throwing state than I thought it would get back to.

Hope there is something that can help you.

[petsku]

James,

thanks for you advices. I'm sure that they are really useful!