A real pain in the.........

.......lateral epicondyle.

Testing fly rods is hard work. Especially when they're 9 weights and up. In an attempt to fully load a possible sponsor rod (a 10-weight; I wanna cast at least the whole fly line with this thing) Harmen-Jan regrettably also fully loaded something else: his elbow.

Oh well, just a little overstraining of the muscles. The best thing to do is probably just some more fishing with the lads. And indeed, all went well during the fishing, but in the evening and the day after Harmen-Jan couldn't pick up a coffee cup. And when he found he even had severe difficulties holding on to his beer, he knew something had to be done right away.

The internet. Epicondylitis lateralis humeri, a.k.a. tennis elbow. A tennis elbow is an inflammation of the tendons that join the forearm muscles on the outside of the elbow. The forearm muscles and tendons become damaged from overuse — repeating the same motions again and again. This leads to pain and tenderness on the outside of the elbow.

Family doctor: "This may take a while, up to a year of rest maybe."
"Well I don't think so doctor, any other options?"

"A fysiotherapist. And if that don't work, we'll inject the damn arm to total silence....."

O.k., let's start with the fysio. Twice a week ultrasound treatment until it hurts to hell, massage it, and train, train train. Concentric weight lifting, or rather, slowly lowering a weight of 2 kg in your hand, so the muscle and especially the tendon gets loaded evenly and gently in order to make it less vulnerable. And indeed, after two weeks it's already getting better. So say goodbye to a full year of treatment. Ha! This will be done within a couple of weeks at the most!

He thought. But then the arm hit back hard. And yet, Harmen-Jan is still confident he'll be able to get rid of this nuisance within no more than two months. Word has it he's already consulting some sort of arm whisperer as we speak. And that's only his second option. God knows what happens if this guy gets desperate!

To be continued.......