[DoctorStrange]

I wanted to share my personal experience with folks. In 2020 I moved to a firearm rights supportive area, after living in NYC for 8 years. While it wasn’t my first time shooting, I purchased a 9 mm handgun and began taking shooting lessons/classes and got a membership to a local range. Because we were in the middle of Covid and the range was open, I went about once a week. My firearm collection grew, from .22 to 12 gauge. I tried a lot of guns at the range too.

Somewhere in 2021 for both elbows tendons or ligaments on the outside starting having significant pain almost like tendonitis. Every time I’d work out if I did any pulling exercise such as pull ups the pain would be excruciating. I never had this happen in all my years of activity and sports.

All other variables were virtually equal, including frequency and intensity of exercise. I tried dialing back weight lifting thinking that might be the issue. No change. Also, my instructors said I had good shooting form.

It wasn’t until I got too busy with work and life to go the range every week that the pain went away. It’s all gone, and everything else is the same. This suggests the me that repeat injuries do occur with regular shooting.

Has anyone else experienced this and any solutions?

 

[G26-Has-my-6]

Once you've recovered try using straps at the gym for pulling exercises and a very light grip for curls. What you are experiencing is related to a tight grip. It could be your shooting if your grip is tighter than you're used to.

To answer your question, I've never had this as a result of shooting, but I have experienced this when I taxed my grip at the gym to the extreme.

 

[3fan]

Address it with your physician, who may refer you to a specialist. Asking us jokers who aren't doctors doesn't seem the most prudent course of action. Hope you find a remedy, to not be able to shoot any longer sure would suck.

 

[DoctorStrange]

Once you've recovered try using straps at the gym for pulling exercises and a very light grip for curls. What you are experiencing is related to a tight grip. It could be your shooting if your grip is tighter than you're used to.

To answer your question, I've never had this as a result of shooting, but I have experienced this when I taxed my grip at the gym to the extreme.

View attachment 1264761

Address it with your physician, who may refer you to a specialist. Asking us jokers who aren't doctors doesn't seem the most prudent course of action. Hope you find a remedy, to not be able to shoot any longer sure would suck.

The pain and issue is gone, but only after I stopped shooting regularly. The question then becomes how to prevent it when I start shooting regularly again. A lot of doctors may not have the recommendations as far as proper form for shooting and so on. They may be able to give a generalized diagnosis.

 

[G26-Has-my-6]

The pain and issue is gone, but only after I stopped shooting regularly. The question then becomes how to prevent it when I start shooting regularly again. A lot of doctors may not have the recommendations as far as proper form for shooting and so on. They may be able to give a generalized diagnosis.

lighter shooting grip? Only grip as firm as necessary.

shoot fewer rounds (less time)?

 

[MarkCO]

lighter shooting grip? Only grip as firm as necessary.

shoot fewer rounds (less time)?

Increase grip strength.

 

[Jason D]

You'd have to shoot extremely powerful firearms to do any actual damage. Are you shooting 500 mag, pistol gripped shotguns with magnum loads? If it's just standard guns it's probably not the guns.

I do suffer from tendonitis to the point it makes my whole dominant arm to feel weak. It's almost always kicked off by doing something stupid and never tied to shooting.

 

[fastbolt]

This sort of repetitive stress condition is what has caused no particular shortage of Magnum revolver and 1911 .45ACP shooters to transition to 9's and .38's as they hit the wrong end of middle age.

I'd not surprised to learn that gripping a handgun too tightly, with the shoulders, elbows and wrists aligned and under tension "just so" for shooting, may be just enough to push a lifetime's accumulation of stresses experienced by our joints to the point where they begin to deliver a bill as we hit our late 40's and continue to age into our 70's & 80's while continuing to shoot. Reducing the amount of felt recoil force may hopefully add useful years to being able to continue shooting.

There's well known 1911 master smith who said he eventually had to stop shooting .45's for competition, and transitioned over to 1911's chambered in 9mm for the reduced stress on his joints.

Increase grip strength.

But do so without strengthening exercises which may continue to aggravate whatever condition you're experiencing.

FWIW, I suffered a series of repetitive injuries at work which wouldn't respond to treatment and which eventually required elbow surgery. My other (non-dominant) elbow can still occasional,y complain and act up, if I do the wrong sort of exercises that stress the connective tissues on the lateral side. Gotta keep it below the pissed off level.

Welcome to the joys of middle age. (Meaning following our younger decades when we didn't read the fine print of connective tissue ownership and maintenance. Annoying. )

 

[G26-Has-my-6]

Increase grip strength.

Since he said he's doing pull-ups (I assume body weight pull-ups and I assume without straps), I'd say he's doing pretty well in the grip department. If I were to guess, he's just gripping that pistol too firmly, more than necessary. With an isometric grip it's hard to know just how much force is applied.

 

[thistle3930]

The pain and issue is gone, but only after I stopped shooting regularly. The question then becomes how to prevent it when I start shooting regularly again. A lot of doctors may not have the recommendations as far as proper form for shooting and so on. They may be able to give a generalized diagnosis.

You could also discuss it with a physical therapist.

 

[fastbolt]

Since he said he's doing pull-ups (I assume body weight pull-ups and I assume without straps), I'd say he's doing pretty well in the grip department. If I were to guess, he's just gripping that pistol too firmly, more than necessary. With an isometric grip it's hard to know just how much force is applied.

I also noticed that doing pull-ups (palms facing forward) created more stress on my elbows than doing chin-ups (palms facing rearward).

Ditto positioning my hands when doing push-ups. There are some days when I have to change the width of my hand position, or turn a hand slightly (or hands, both) to relieve stress on the elbows.

Connective tissues not only become less pliable as we age, but they seem as though they can become easily offended and cranky if we continue to do things the same way we did them in our unthinking youth, and we continue to piss them off, thinking they're still young and made out of very forgiving rubber.

A close friend of my, Hany Rambod (owner of Evogen Nutrition), who is a trainer of athletes, including for the Mr Olympia, started telling me many years ago (in my late 50's) that I needed to change the way I exercised and put stress on my connective tissues. Being in our 20's is one thing, and even into our 30's (when we think we're still in our teens and 20's ), but the body can start to request some better attention as we breeze through our 40's and 50's, and the 60's and older is when we really ought to be paying better attention to staving off injuries of our own making.

 

[grumpy1]

Consider making an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon that specializes in shoulder/elbow/wrist/hand. He/she can examine you, probably do an x-ray on each elbow, listen to your concerns, and advise including physical therapy if need be. My guy is great and for my shoulder gave me printouts of a bunch of exercises/stretches to do and a prescription of meloxicam.

My son takes collagen peptides and says it helps with his elbow pain when exercising.

 

[3fan]

The pain and issue is gone, but only after I stopped shooting regularly. The question then becomes how to prevent it when I start shooting regularly again. A lot of doctors may not have the recommendations as far as proper form for shooting and so on. They may be able to give a generalized diagnosis.

A generalized diagnosis may well come with a treatment plan resulting in a cure of your issue, or it may result in a referral to a specialist such as a sports medicine doctor or orthopedic doctor who could provide you with a cure. Any of those of those are head & shoulders above what responses you'd receive on this forum from a bunch of laymen, taking guesses regarding your health. Even if someone chimes in with "I had the exact same symptoms, here's what fixed it" it may well not apply to you as everyone is different. That your pain is gone is great, but that's come at the cost of your ability to shoot, which you seem to want to be able to start again. Without treatment your issue is likely to reappear if you start shooting again. Instead of chasing solutions here, you should start with your doctor.

 

[TheDirtyGoT]

Try shooting with a weaver stance

 

[JDSTG58]

Talk to your doctor or a physical therapist, may be a symptom of something else. Everyone is different. That said I’ve been shooting 357, 44 mag and such for 40 years. Only issue is hearing loss from when I was young and dumb shooting without hearing protection. Could also be from running heavy equipment, chainsaws and jackhammers without hearing protection in my 20s

 

[Mountain10mm]

My experience is the opposite. When I shoot, pain goes away and my stress levels in life decrease.

 

[Rotn1]

The only time I feel “pain” or feel some shooting hangover is when I launch big bore pistols 44 Mag / 50 mag or full power 12 gauge buckshot or slugs. Come to think of it if I shoot a lot of 30.06 in the historical guns or 308 in light rifles ( 7 lbs) then I feel it in my neck ( Cervical stenosis from football)…….
So I shoot less of that stuff and more of “other stuff) …. Not going to shoot less - just different.

 

[pgm74]

Has anyone else experienced this and any solutions?

Yes, I've had that before. Similar circumstances of when I was lifting 5-6 hours a week and shooting 400-500 rounds a week. Google "shooter's elbow". But yes, just really tendinitis and I had similar experiences with certain exercises like you describe aggravating it.

In my experience, it came on from not only grip overuse but also from grip form that didn't work for me. I hesitate to call it "bad form" because I also had extensive training on handguns already and was shooting pretty good, at least as far as I knew then, and was following techniques and grip analysis by some pretty well known and respected instructors. But that aggressive high and outstretched support hand grip with thumb hanging way out there like all the cool kids I had developed was really just an overdriven grip that was biomechanically imbalanced and wrecking my body. My advice would be to look very hard at your grip as the culprit. Even if you think it's good, any grip that causes your body to scream at you for probably isn't good.

For reference only because there are different ways to build the grip and it's kind of what works best for you deal, for me it was the Haley Strategic approach to grip that I picked up at his D5 class that fixed me. Going in, during the "what do you want from this class" question, mine was specifically about "I can shoot decently well but flair up my tendonitis, or shoot worse and not hurt. How do I balance that? Help. " Their deep dive into biomechanics of shooting resolved my issues, knock on wood, now for over 3 years. I have shot better than ever before, since scrapping and rebuilding my grip, and haven't had pain while doing so.

Best I got. Good luck.

 

[DoctorStrange]

You'd have to shoot extremely powerful firearms to do any actual damage. Are you shooting 500 mag, pistol gripped shotguns with magnum loads? If it's just standard guns it's probably not the guns.

I do suffer from tendonitis to the point it makes my whole dominant arm to feel weak. It's almost always kicked off by doing something stupid and never tied to shooting.

The only time it appeared was when j shot regularly, ever in my life. All other variables to my knowledge were held equal, including heavy exercise. I stopped shooting as much, and it went away completely. It’s highly likely it was due to shooting, my grip, form, etc.

 

[0311INF]

Yes, I have the same issue in my right elbow. Not brought on by shooting, but aggravated by it. I just abbreviate my pistol shooting some, focus on rifle practice and do lighter weights when lifting.