Hi, I have been training with progressive overload with every workout every week. However, I started to feel this nagging pain in the pinky side of my left forearm whenever I rotate my forearm. I also noticed a decrease in strength in my left forearm, which affects my workout overall. It all started with biceps curls, in which I loaded too much weight on it. May I know what should I do to prevent muscle mass loss in other parts of the body since the left side of my arm cant lift as heavy now? Thanks!

Forearm Tendonitus can be a pain. It took me 2 years of laying off the stuff that irritated it to get past it. There are plenty of things you can do so your gainz don't go out the window. under handed grip rows and chinups, lighter weight higher rep concentration curls. You can even wrap your forearms in a wrap using compression. Just be easy doing anything that upsets it or it'll just get worse. Matter of fact if I do heavy arm curls more than once a wekk mine still get irritated.

Hey thanks so much for your advice! Just wondering if I were to decrease my volume, will I still be able to maintain or even gain muscle mass? Kinda worry I will lose muscle mass since I cannot lift as heavy on one arm.

You can keep the volume by lowering the weight and adding reps. If you've been working a high volume training for a while it would be counter productive to cut it down but something is better than nothing if you have no choice. Like I said you don't have to lift heavy to grow you can do that with lighter weight and higher reps and still not irritate your Tendonitis. You may not gain strength as fast. You can do heavy under handed rows and hit biceps hard without irritation in my experience or do Chin ups ect. You just got to find what works for you.

Great advice from Aaron! Another thing you can do to help overload without heavy weights is slow down your tempo - so do things like 3 second negatives, 2 second pauses at peak contraction, things like that will make light weight feel SUPER heavy by the time you get to the end of your sets.

Hopefully you can get the pain right as soon as possible though! Make sure you are doing any self massage you can as well if that helps to alleviate pain.

Thanks so much Aaron and Scott! Just a quick update, I am so happy that the pain wore off after 2 weeks, and now I can get back to my workouts. However, I am still worried it might come back again when doing biceps workout. May I have some advice on what to do for biceps?

Just do some lighter weight, slow tempo training if you think going heavy is what could cause the forearm pain. You can also do some hook grip training with your bicep movements (without having your thumb around the bar) because that will take away some forearm activation.

Also make sure that you massage them/foam roll them after training biceps.. maybe even after each workout. It doesn't have to be a long massage session, just a quick one to release any tightness that might have built up while you're training.

Been having similar issue. Any pre-workout stretches or warm ups you can suggest?

I regularly use a foam roller and tennis balls after workouts on my back and legs and never thought about using it on my forearms.

Do the foam rolling as a pre-workout strategy to loosen the forearms up a bit. You could do some really light wrist curls as a warm-up to, just nothing that will fatigue your forearms or aggrivate the pain.