Wow, awesome weblog layout! How long have you been blogging for? you made running a blog glance easy. The full glance of your site is excellent, let alone the content!

John:

I am so happy you suggested I try the MonoGut for my re-entry to tennis after my tennis elbow re-injury. I was skeptical because I thought natural gut was the best for preventing tennis elbow issues, but I trusted your judgment and I’m glad I did. I am very happy with how the string performs. It only took a few shots to get used to it and ultimately I am able to hit hard, deep shots with no elbow issues whatsoever.

Details:

I injured my elbow in late February, 2015 shortly after switching to very stiff Babolat racquets and working on increasing power in my game. The diagnosis was Medial Epicondylitis (Golfer’s Elbow). I felt severe pain on my forehand, especially hard volleys. I played through the pain through the first week in March when I finally decided to stop playing and allow my body to heal. I didn’t play for about 4 weeks and felt about 98% better. I still felt some pain on certain shots, but overall I could play well with little or no pain. Ultimately I re-injured it due to mis-hits blocking some very hard shots at the net (and over-use again).

So once again, I decided to stop playing until I could get the elbow strong. This time I took a more aggressive approach in rehabilitation and equipment. I did about 2 weeks of acupuncture treatments, took vitamin and mineral supplements, had massage treatments, and had frequent ice baths for the elbow. I researched racquets and found several listed with a much lower stiffness rating and then came to you for advice. You were very helpful in cutting through the raw stiffness numbers to ultimately get me to the combination of the Volkl Organix V1 Midplus with Ashaway 17 Guage MonoGut ZX Pro strung at 45.

Frankly, while I had heard great things about Volkl, I was surprised at your choice of racquets because the stiffness rating was similar to the Babolat. I was even more surprised when you suggested a synthetic string over natural gut. Nonetheless, I trusted your judgment and went with both of your recommendations and boy am I glad I did. It took a little getting used to, but the racquet / string combination seemed to beg for proper form (e.g. racquet back, full swing and good follow through). I found that if I used bad form, vibration/elbow pain was not an issue, but the ball would typically go in the net. This was not a bad thing as it forced me to use good form without punishing my elbow when I went back to old habits. After the initial 5 or 10 minutes, I was hitting deep balls with good spin and control and no pain.

A little over a week after starting to play with the new racquet / string combination, I played in the USTA 40+ State Championship for my local league. I played four brutal matches a 36-hour period and the elbow felt as good at the end as it did at the beginning. By the end of the competition, I had literally completely forgotten about the elbow injury. The icing on the cake is that I managed to win all four of my matches.

Thanks so much for the great recommendations and excellent service.

Kind regards,

Frank Vilece
Vilece Technology Services