Welcome to your modern fitness daily news report! Every weekday, we break down the trending fitness news, tips, and insider scoops to keep you informed. Each read will be under 3 minutes so that you can stay shredded and thumb through no-nonsense fit-quips. Thanks for reading!
TODAY’S LEVEL UP:
Pro Tip: Elbow Pain After 40: Training Through Tennis and Golfer's Elbow
Supplement Spotlight: Vitamin C — Less About Colds, More About Connective Tissue
Did You Know?: Most "tendinitis" isn't actually inflammation
Question: "Should I be wearing an elbow strap?"
Fit Trivia: Which tennis champion won her final Grand Slam title at 49, weeks before turning 50?
Elbow Pain After 40: Training Through Tennis and Golfer's Elbow
It usually starts small. A twinge on the outside of the elbow when you pick up a coffee cup. Some tenderness on the inside when you grip a bar. You ignore it, it stays, and eight months later you've quietly stopped doing half your pulling work.
The two versions:
Tennis elbow (lateral epicondylalgia): pain on the outside of the elbow, at the common extensor origin. Aggravated by gripping, reverse curls, wide-grip pulldowns, and anything that loads wrist extension.
Golfer's elbow (medial epicondylalgia): pain on the inside. Aggravated by heavy pulling, chin-ups, curls, and hard gripping.
Neither requires playing the sport it's named after. In lifters, they're overload problems: too much gripping volume, too fast a jump in pulling work, or a grip position your forearm doesn't like repeated a few thousand times.
What to do — and rest is not the answer:
Start with isometrics: They build tendon capacity and often reduce pain immediately. For tennis elbow: extend the wrist against a light dumbbell and hold 30–45 seconds, 4–5 rounds, at an effort that's challenging but never sharp. For golfer's elbow, mirror it with wrist flexion. Daily is fine.
Progress to slow eccentrics: Once the isometrics are comfortable, lower a light dumbbell through wrist extension (or flexion) over a 3–4 second count, assisting with the other hand on the way up. 3 sets of 12–15, three times a week. This is the best-supported piece of the whole protocol.
Change the grip, don't delete the exercise: Neutral or rotating handles on rows and pulldowns, EZ bar instead of straight bar for curls, fat grips to reduce how hard you have to squeeze, and straps on heavy pulls to take the grip demand out. Most men can keep training everything with two or three of these swaps.
Cut grip volume temporarily: Heavy farmer's carries, deadhangs, and max-effort deadlifts stack forearm load fast. Pull them back for 4–6 weeks while the tendon catches up.
Look upstream: Shoulder and mid-back weakness often means your forearm is doing work it shouldn't. Rows, face pulls, and scapular work belong in the plan.
Expect months, not weeks. Tendon remodeling is slow, and 6–12 weeks of consistent loading is a normal timeline. Judging progress by how it feels after four days will only convince you it isn't working.
And know when it isn't: numbness or tingling into the hand or fingers, weakness that isn't pain-related, pain that followed a distinct pop or tear, night pain that wakes you, or anything that hasn't improved at all in three months — those are worth seeing a doctor or physio about rather than self-managing.
Supplement Spotlight: Vitamin C — Less About Colds, More About Connective Tissue
Vitamin C has a reputation problem in both directions. It's oversold as a cold cure and undersold as a structural nutrient — and for a man dealing with a cranky tendon, the second role is the more interesting one.
Here's what it does: Vitamin C is an essential cofactor for the enzymes that hydroxylate proline and lysine — the step that lets collagen fibers cross-link into strong, stable tissue. That means it's genuinely required for building tendon, ligament, skin, and bone matrix. It also supports immune function and dramatically improves absorption of non-heme (plant-source) iron. On the cold question, the honest summary from the research is that routine supplementation doesn't meaningfully prevent colds in the general population; it may shorten duration slightly, and there's a more convincing signal in people under extreme physical stress. Correcting a shortfall matters. Piling more on top of adequate intake mostly produces expensive urine.
How to take it: The RDA for adult men is 90 mg per day — which is one orange and a handful of bell pepper, not a supplement. If you're supplementing around connective-tissue work, the commonly used protocol pairs roughly 500 mg with 10–15 g of collagen or gelatin, 30–60 minutes before loading the tissue. The evidence for that timing is preliminary, and the underlying nutrient requirement is the well-established part.
Worth knowing: the tolerable upper limit is 2,000 mg per day. Above that, GI upset is common, and high doses raise urinary oxalate — which matters if you have a history of kidney stones or kidney disease. Men with hemochromatosis or iron-overload conditions should be cautious, since vitamin C increases iron absorption.
We recommend food first and modest doses second — the requirement is real, but this is a nutrient where the returns flatten out almost immediately past adequate.
FROM RYAN’S DESK
There comes a point when you have to stop asking what you can get away with and start asking what you're capable of. Average effort produces average results. If you want a different outcome, you have to bring a different level of commitment. Be the guy who challenges himself instead of settling into what feels comfortable. That's how you separate yourself from the crowd.
Did You Know?: Most "Tendinitis" Isn't Actually Inflammation
For decades, a sore tendon was called "tendinitis," and the -itis implied inflammation — which is why the standard prescription was rest and anti-inflammatories. Then researchers started looking at tissue samples from chronically painful tendons and found something unexpected: in most long-standing cases, the classic inflammatory cells largely weren't there.
What they found instead was degeneration — disorganized collagen fibers, increased ground substance, and new blood vessel and nerve growth into tissue that shouldn't have much of either. The term shifted to tendinopathy to reflect it.
That's not a semantic footnote. It changed the treatment. If the problem is degenerated, under-loaded tissue rather than an inflammatory flare, then rest makes it worse and progressive loading is the treatment — which is why modern rehab for a cranky elbow, Achilles, or patellar tendon looks like slow, heavy, controlled work rather than a sling and a bottle of ibuprofen.
Early, genuinely acute irritation may still involve an inflammatory component. But the nagging six-month elbow almost certainly needs load, not rest.
Question from Our Readers: "Should I be wearing an elbow strap?"
A counterforce strap — the band worn just below the elbow — can genuinely help, but it's worth understanding what it's doing. It doesn't heal anything. It applies pressure that changes how force is distributed through the tendon origin, which for many men reduces pain during the activity. That's useful, and reduced pain lets you keep training and keep loading, which is what actually fixes the problem.
Use it during aggravating activity — a work task, a pulling session, a round of golf — rather than all day. Position it about an inch below the painful spot, snug but not tight enough to numb your hand.
The mistake is treating it as the plan. A strap that lets you keep gripping hard while doing nothing else means the tendon keeps getting the load that irritated it, minus the pain signal telling you to adjust. Pair it with the loading work, not instead of it.
Same logic applies to anti-inflammatories: reasonable for a bad few days, counterproductive as a months-long strategy.
Our Picks: Supps We Actually Use
Some of our coach’s favorite supplements:
Creatine (Travel Packs) - $36
Add this to your water in the morning or in your post-workout shake. Creatine is one of the few supplements that has a mountain of data proving its benefits. Don’t miss out on it!
A great way to hit your protein goals. Don’t rely on a protein powder alone, but add it as a post-workout shake or midday shake to increase your protein intake and hit your protein goals. Remember, high protein equals higher muscle and higher satiety.
Replenishes essential electrolytes. Use this if you sweat a lot, do intermittent fasting, or go on long-distance walks, hikes, or runs.
We are a proud partner of Thorne Supplements! We are affiliated and use these products. We may receive commission from your purchase.
Fit Trivia: Which tennis champion — one of the first players to build a full-time team around strength training, nutrition, and cross-training in the early 1980s, at a time when most pros simply played more tennis — won a record 59 Grand Slam titles across singles and doubles, the last of them in mixed doubles at the 2006 US Open, a few weeks before her 50th birthday?
Answer: Martina Navratilova! Her training methods were considered eccentric when she introduced them and are now simply how professional tennis works — and winning a major at 49 remains one of the better arguments in sport that conditioning buys you years.
Ryan Engel, Intl. Fat Loss Coach
Ryan is a leading fitness coach and one of the most known professionals in the space.
He specializes in Body Recomposition and visual body aesthetics and has reached millions worldwide with his powerful messaging. He brings a unique, non-nonsense, yet sophisticated approach to body change.
Publisher: Ryan Engel
Editor: Michael Pender
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