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The above will all help you with the prevention, management and treatment of tendinitis in general, but what about when you’ve got tendinitis specifically in one area?

Sticking to the general advice is your first step, and hopefully you’ll avoid full blown tendinitis, but should you develop tendinitis, try including specific tendinitis drills in your training routine while adapting the rest of your workout to accommodate your symptoms and condition.
Knee Tendinitis
Start each session by foam rolling and stretching your quads, hip flexors, hamstrings, abductors and adductors. (A foam roller is a dense tube of foam that you lie on and roll around. It sounds mad, but this works in a similar way to a sports massage by loosening up all your tight muscle tissue.) Spend 10 minutes doing this before you train and on your off-days too.
Single-leg moves and knee stabilization exercises are your best friends on tackling knee tendinitis.
For the single-leg work, try forward and reverse lunges, split squats and bird dogs, where you kneel on all fours and lift your opposite leg and arm out straight.
As for hip stabilization moves, side lying clams are a good bet. Lie on your side and lift your top leg as high as you can. For a more advanced exercise, go with X-band walks, where you stand with both feet on a resistance band, cross the ends of the band at waist-height and take steps out to either side.
Wrist Tendinitis
Stretch out your forearms as often as possible. Tight forearm muscles equals tight wrists, equals unhappy tendons.
For your exercises, wrist curls and reverse wrist curls using a light dumbbell, barbell or cable machine work well. You can even use your other hand as resistance instead of a weight. For something incredibly simple, try squeezing a tennis ball to strengthen your forearms too. Do this between sets or as part of your warm up.
Elbow Tendinitis
Stretching and massage are the names of the game again here – are you starting to see a picture emerging!?
Aside from that, the wrist curls you did for wrist tendinitis can help with elbow tendinitis too, as can any light upper body moves. Try isolation arm exercises such as triceps pushdowns, triceps extensions and biceps curls. If these give you grief, go for multi-joint compounds instead. Your elbows are still working, but the load will be distributed onto your shoulders as well as your elbows. Pushups, rows, dumbbell presses and pulldowns are all good choices here.
Hip Tendinitis
Treating hip tendinitis is all about developing a bigger range of motion, particularly around your hip flexors. Extended ROM lunges, where you take a big step back, then bring your leg up to your chest as you step forward will help you make a start in your recovery. Even just performing small circular motions with your hips, along with glute moves such as bridge raises and hip thrusts will start to build the tendons back up to full strength.
- Tendinitis
- By Mayo Clinic
- Accessed on June 27th, 2013
- www.mayoclinic.com/health/tendinitis/DS00153
- Photo courtesy of Ariel H. by Flickr : www.flickr.com/photos/fotosrotas/2729906881/
- Photo courtesy of 88mvc by Wikimedia Commons : commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prone_Knee_Flexion.JPG
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