How Sports Lead to Tendinitis and How We Can Help Prevent Surgery

Golfer's elbow, tennis elbow, pitcher’s shoulder, runner’s knee — when a health condition is named after a sport, it says something. 

At the heart of many of these conditions are overuse or stress injuries in your tendons, or tendinitis, and athletes of all kinds are no strangers to this common sports injury.

If there’s one thing that our team here at Revive Spine and Pain Center understands about athletes it’s that they hate to be sidelined. 

And we couldn’t agree more — being active is important for your health, so we focus our efforts on nonsurgical treatments for tendinitis that get you back into the game more quickly and safely.

In the following, we explore why your tendons are in the line of fire when you’re active and how we can help them heal when you develop tendinitis.

Tendinitis basics

Your body contains a whopping 4,000 tendons, which are tough connective tissues that attach muscles to bone. In other words, you wouldn’t be able to move much without your tendons.

If these tissues are overstressed through repetitive use, they can develop tiny little tears that lead to inflammation, which is essentially the definition of tendinitis. 

This inflammation can make your tendon painful and stiff, as well as set you up for even bigger problems such as tendon tears, either partial or complete. 

Some of the more common forms of tendinitis include:

• Achilles tendinitis
• Golfer’s elbow
• Tennis elbow
• Pitcher’s shoulder
• Wrist tendinitis
• Jumper’s knee
• Hip tendinitis
• Tendinitis at the base of your thumb

Again, there are other tendons that can be affected, but these represent the most common.

Nonsurgical treatment options for tendinitis

As sports medicine specialists, we understand the importance of intervening early — in the tendinitis stage — so you can avoid surgical intervention, which would sideline you for much longer. 

For example, one of the most common sports injuries is an Achilles tendon rupture, which can take you out of the game for 6-12 months or more.

Instead of that scenario, we prefer to see you when there’s tendinitis, at which point we can take steps to help these connective tissues heal strongly and quickly.

First, we ask that you take it easy and give the tendon some much-needed rest and space. To remain active, you can try some activity modification. If you have tendinitis in your shoulder, for example, skip racquet sports, throwing, and swimming, and use this time to strengthen your lower body.

Next, we want to do what we can to help the tendon heal through these nonsurgical treatments:

Physical therapy 

Through physical therapy, we strengthen the muscles that surround your tendons and work on maintaining your range of motion.

Joint injections 

Our interventional joint injections can tackle the pain and inflammation in your tendons.

Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy

Regenerative therapies like PRP redirect your body’s own healing resources, such as your platelets, into damaged tissues. The platelets then promote healing by calling on growth factors to rebuild and repair the tendon.

Percutaneous tenotomy 

Your tendons don’t have great circulation and access to healing resources. So during a tenotomy, we use a needle to make tiny puncture wounds in the damaged tendon to encourage more circulation and to break up scar tissue. 

As you can see, there are plenty of options for tendinitis, and we often use a combination for best results.

If you want to avoid surgery for your tendon injury, please contact us at one of our conveniently located offices in Marlton, Hamilton Township, Northfield, or East Brunswick, New Jersey, to schedule an appointment.