Elbow Pain with Pullups (QUICK FIX!)

Train without pain with MECHAN-X joint recovery formula
Elbow pain is extremely common when doing pullups. If you feel a burning or sharp pain on the inside of your elbow when you do a pull up, you could be suffering from medial epicondylitis or golfer’s elbow. This doesn’t have to prevent you from doing this king of all back exercises forever though if you work on fixing the problem (both short term and long term) with the tips shown in this video.
The first thing you need to do is understand why you get pain in your inner elbow when doing pullups. When the reps get tough, we have a tendency to try and cheat our way up to the bar using all sorts of compensations. In order to feel as if we are getting our chin closer to the bar we reach with our head and more significantly, pull with our forearms. This tends to over activate the flexor and pronator muscles of our wrists. Even our fingers kick in and work too much as the flexors in our hands work to try and help out the lats to get your body up to the bar.
In order to diminish the contribution of these extra muscles that simply aren’t equipped for the job of pulling you up to the bar as the lats are, you’re doing to want to consciously avoid making these compensations. The easiest way to do this is by switching to a neutral grip pullup, however this is not the ideal way. A pull up done this way works more of the inner back muscles than it does the lats since you are changing the plane of motion that the exercise is being performed in.
If you want to maximize the benefits of the pull up for your back you are going to want to perform it in the frontal plane, with your elbows out to your sides (not in front of your body). That said, you want to be sure to initiate the move by packing the shoulders down and using the available movement in your shoulder blades. This will not only get you moving but also stabilize your shoulder girdle for the remainder of the move and eliminate the need for the elbows and wrists to contribute or cheat.
If you are already dealing with elbow pain when doing pullups, you can diminish it by doing what I show you in this video. Hang a resistance band over a pull up bar (the athlean x-treme band is the one I’m using) and overlap the two ends to create extra thickness on the band. Now, wrap your pinky, ring and middle finger over the band and grasp the bar with just your index finger and thumb. This acts to diminish the activation of the flexor digitorum profundis muscle which can easily get inflamed and bother your elbow (with it’s attachment at the medial epicondyle).
You should immediately feel some easing up or a complete release of the pain you have at your inner elbow. With your ability to do this pain free you can now keep doing the pullup without having to avoid it all together, while still being able to modify your form to prevent this from coming back again.
To prevent elbow pain and other joint pain from getting in the way of your results and workouts, you will want to check out ATHLEAN-Rx MECHAN-X. This joint recovery formula is the exact same supplement used by the top teams in major league baseball to keep their players healthy and on the field all season long.
For more videos on working out with joint pain or muscle pain, be sure to subscribe to our channel here on youtube at