Hey,
I’ve been playing for a year or so and recently started getting some slight elbow pain. Based on googling it’s probably called “golfer’s elbow” (pain is on the inside of the elbow).
Does anyone happen to have any insights into what might help or some general advice on how to best minimize strain on the elbow when shooting a ball?
Thanks!
Hi Jonathan,
Thank you for posting this because I feel like we need more discussions and reports of personal experiences on this subject.
Before we get to the response(s), important disclaimer: I am no doctor and it’s always best to seek professional help.
You are not the first one affected by elbow pain playing bike polo, and this seems to be a growing problem.
Bike polo is relatively young and evolving rapidly, it is a contact sport and with more and more players pushing the limits, injuries are bound to happen, some incidental during crashes but also some others developing as a long term conditions such as the elbow pain.
Afaik (from the players I know about), there seems to be two main types occurring: the Tennis elbow (pain is in the top of forearm near the elbow joint) and the Golfer’s elbow (pain is on the inside of the elbow).
These are fairly frequent conditions among athletes and amateurs from these sports but also anyone developing bad everyday habits on postures, movements etc… (the typing on the keyboard example is commonly referred to), and therefore there is a lot of information as well as misinformation online, or at least I sometimes found conflicting information searching for help.
A few years ago, I had tennis elbow for a couple of months (idk maybe 4-6m), so my tips may not be relevant to your situation. For me, what I believe helped, was to stop playing for a while, using a roller to massage the area, and with hot/cold applications, then later start playing easy: not shooting at first, and it got slowly better. You’d have to figure out the duration of the break by yourself, it takes time… Finding a treatment that works for you can be difficult and frustrating because the healing progress may not be immediately obvious.
Id like to take this opportunity to also discuss prevention, it would benefit the community to try to understand what causes this in bike polo. Imo everything is connected and the devil must lie in the details, it starts with the mallet: what type (carbon or aluminium), how long, what head (i.e. how much weight at the end), what type of grip and size. Then how do you hold and grip the mallet (hand/finger placement), play style (loads of dribbling vs. big shots), do you rest your mallet on your bars and how, and finally what’s your shooting motion style. Maybe you have changed any of these recently that could have an impact? How tall is a player and how long are their arms vs. the length of their mallet, this as a ratio could reveal something perhaps? I guess only by collecting more data from everyone affected we could potentially see some pattern(s) emerging? Let’s see what ppl think. I would be keen to run some kind of survey on this if there is interest.
In general, how about creating a dedicated sub section to talk about bike polo related health ?
Sorry for the long message and hijacking your post, best of luck with sorting it out, this really sucks.
TLDR: to everyone, be careful and treat this problem very seriously as it can a have long lasting negative impact on your ability to play and everyday life ! Share your personal experience!
Hi Jonathan,
sorry to hear that, I’ve had it a couple of times and it sucks. Can take months to go away. My 2 cents:
Good luck!
I don’t know how comparable it is, but I had pain in my shoulder rather than tennis elbow. Taking a break for it to recover then switching to ultra light milk shafts (when they had them,) and then to carbon solved the pain I had.
I’m sure what folks have already talked about here is more up your alley. But I thought adding my experience might be helpful for someone else since we’re on the topic of pain/injuries.
Thanks for the great advice everyone :)
I guess I’ll look into carbon shafts, do my exercises, and try to refrain from playing polo then 
@Frax Tbh, I was a bit surprised that I hadn’t found anything on elbow injuries when I had searched on poloverse. I think having a central place for health related stuff would be awesome!
i went otb last year and messed up my elbow, my symptoms were the same as tennis elbow. i bought a couple teraband flexbars in different resistances and did tennis elbow rehab exercises and now i’m more or less back to normal, tho it does start hurting after a couple hours of polo. i haven’t gone to carbon shafts yet but i have been doing my best to use lighter mallets and stretch before playing.
Hey !
Sorry, I didn’t take the time to fully read what’s before but I had this too in the past.
Here are my 2 cents (probably not true for everyone) :
First :
I’m in BouBou team.
I would say that it is always recommended to start with visiting good physio. After getting back to serious polo practice after almost 5 years I felt a lot of pain in elbow in very prosaic situations i.e. while squeezing a bottle with shampoo. Everyone told me that it must be the X(select your favourite buzzword) elbow.
I visited the physio and she told me that It can be that fancy elbow thing, but it doesn’t have to and based on her experience my arm and hand muscles are just really tensed in prolonged manner. She gave me some easy exercises to do after practice: stretching, rolling but some strength building exercises as well and after 2-3 weeks the pain was gone. Now I don’t even do these exercises - my arm got used to the practice again. I advice to go to physio because I was trying to do very similar exercises on my own based on youtube videos and then I realised that I was just doing it wrong. Probably some golfer/tennis elbow exercises could even worsen my situation. Despite many opinions it was not my problem 
Of course I would also pay attention to lot of things mentioned here:
proper grip, proper gloves, proper habits (don’t grip mallet really strong all the time)
of course, seeing a doctor is the right move.
i’m in the states, it’s not so easy (read: it’s really expensive) for me to go see a doctor over a hurt elbow. the tennis elbow exercises fixed me up, but if you’re able to see a doctor then that’s obviously the first move.
This thread will help a lot of people now and in the future. This is why I love Poloverse. Thanks everyone taking time to reply with valuable information.
Tennis elbow is also a common climbing injury. The flexbar, resistance exercise, carbon shafts, and foam grip have all helped mitigate wrist pain for me.
This is very timely and very helpful, thanks all!