When one of my personal training clients recently reported a tender left elbow, we were both puzzled. There were no obvious exercises in her program that could have been responsible for the ongoing pain.

“What have you been doing outside of your workouts?” I asked. “Moving heavy furniture, vigorous raking, overly-enthusiastic cleaning?”

We eventually agreed that the injury must have been caused by carrying home a particularly heavy bag of food from the grocery store.

But after four weeks of physio, the nagging pain was still there..

“There must be an everyday activity that’s irritating your elbow,” said her therapist.

After some thought my client realized that, yes, there was one action she was doing multiple times each day (perhaps even each hour) with her left arm: flicking her wrist to check her step count on her new Fitbit!

The ultimate cure? Simply a temporary switch of the watch to her other wrist and a more-relaxed approach to tracking her stats..