Part of Golfer's elbow
Golfer's elbow or a trapped nerve at the elbow (cubital tunnel)
Warning signs, and when to get help
Golfer's elbow vs cubital tunnel: pain or tingling?
Golfer's elbow is a tendon, sore where it anchors onto the bony lump on the inside of the elbow after taking more load than it could handle. Cubital tunnel syndrome is a nerve, the ulnar nerve, squeezed or stretched where it passes behind that same bony lump in a shallow groove. Two different tissues, a finger's width apart. That closeness is the only reason this question needs a page at all.
Each tissue complains in its own way. A tendon gives you pain, worst when you grip something firmly or bend the wrist against resistance, and it keeps to a small patch you can cover with a fingertip. A nerve shows up in the skin it supplies and the muscles it drives, so the complaint is tingling, numbness or a hand that feels clumsy rather than an elbow that feels sore. Readers searching for a trapped nerve at the elbow, or a pinched nerve, are nearly always describing the second thing.
So the short answer is that pain on gripping points toward the tendon and buzzing fingers point toward the nerve. Then the caveats. Golfer's elbow sometimes produces finger symptoms of its own, the two can sit in the same elbow at once, and symptoms coming from the neck can imitate either. The rest of this page works through them. Treatment for each sits elsewhere, in the golfer's elbow program and the cubital tunnel syndrome program.
Can golfer's elbow cause numbness in the fingers?
Yes, it can, and that is the part most comparisons skip. OrthoInfo, the patient site of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, says on its golfer's elbow page that some patients also develop numbness and tingling in their ring and pinky fingers. It gives the reason a few lines later: people with medial epicondylitis occasionally develop irritation of the nearby ulnar nerve.
Konarski and colleagues (2023) take it further in their review of the condition, which classifies medial epicondylitis into two subtypes, one without ulnar involvement and one with it. That reframes the whole question. You are not necessarily picking between a tendon problem and a nerve problem as though only one can be true, because a tendon problem with an irritated nerve beside it is a recognized version of golfer's elbow rather than a contradiction of it.
Pain is worth keeping separate from tingling, too. OrthoInfo's symptom list for golfer's elbow includes occasional shooting pain down toward the hand, and pain traveling along the forearm is not the same as numbness or pins and needles, even though many people report both as "it goes into my hand". Which of those words you use changes what a clinician does next, so it pays to be fussy about it. Where the tendon pain tends to spread, and how far, is covered on where golfer's elbow hurts and where it spreads.
What sets each one off
The tendon responds to effort. Gripping hard while the wrist is working is the combination that finds it: swinging a hammer, hauling on a rope, an afternoon with a screwdriver, holding a heavy pan out in front of you, a golf shot taken out of thick grass. The pain usually arrives during the task or soon after it, and it eases when you stop asking the muscles to pull.
The nerve is indifferent to how hard you grip. It responds to the angle the elbow is held at, and to pressure on the groove it lies in. OrthoInfo says ulnar symptoms happen more often when the elbow is bent, naming driving and holding the phone, adds that leaning on the elbow for long periods puts pressure on the nerve, and notes that many people sleep with the elbow bent and wake with numb fingers. So the nerve's triggers are positions and time rather than load. What to change about those positions, by day and at night, is set out on the cubital tunnel syndrome program, and the night half of it, read from the inner elbow rather than from the nerve, is on sleeping position and night pain with golfer's elbow.
That gives you a better question than "where does it hurt". Ask what your arm was doing in the few minutes before the symptom arrived. Gripping and lifting is one kind of answer. Sitting still with the arm folded, or driving for an hour, is a very different one.
Where the weakness shows up
Both conditions can leave you with a weak grip, which is why grip strength on its own separates nothing. OrthoInfo lists weak grip strength as a symptom of golfer's elbow, and it also describes a weakening grip with the ulnar nerve, alongside difficulty with finger coordination such as typing or playing an instrument, which it says is usually seen in the more severe cases of compression.
What a physiotherapist listens for is the reason the grip failed. With a tendon, squeezing hurts, and the hand lets go because of the pain rather than because the power has gone. With a nerve, the power itself is missing and the hand is clumsy with it, so jars, keys and buttons get harder and things slip out of the hand without any pain to explain it. The same source explains why that is. The ulnar nerve drives most of the small muscles in the hand that do the fine work, along with some of the larger forearm muscles behind a strong grip, so its weakness spreads across the hand rather than sitting at the elbow.
There is one sign a tendon never produces. Muscle that looks thinner or hollow on one hand compared with the other, particularly in the web between the thumb and index finger, means a nerve has been under pressure for a long time, and OrthoInfo is blunt that this kind of wasting cannot be reversed once it happens. That is not something to keep an eye on for another few months. The warning list at the foot of this page gives it with a timeframe attached.
Can you have golfer's elbow and cubital tunnel together?
Yes, and anatomy makes it unsurprising. The ulnar nerve passes immediately behind the tendon's anchor point, so a swollen, irritated inner elbow and an irritated nerve are not separate neighborhoods. Konarski and colleagues (2023) build that into their two subtypes, and for overhead athletes they advise evaluating for ulnar neuritis and ulnar collateral ligament instability, which may also coexist. If you throw and your pain began with a pop or a sudden snap on the inside of the elbow, read golfer's elbow or a UCL injury and treat the warning list below as the first thing on the page, not the last.
The practical consequence is about how you describe things. People tend to lead with the symptom that bothers them most and leave the other one out, so the tendon pain gets reported and the fingers never come up, or the reverse. Say both. A clinician who knows about the pain and the tingling will examine the tendon and the nerve; one who only hears about the pain has been given a reason not to check the nerve.
It also matters when a program is not working. An elbow loading program that keeps provoking a hand symptom is telling you something, and a page that has not improved in weeks is worth rereading with that in mind: why golfer's elbow is not getting better covers the rest of those reasons.
What else makes the inside of the elbow tingle
Nerve symptoms in a hand do not have to start at the elbow, and three other places come up often enough to name. The neck is the first, where an irritated nerve root can send symptoms down the arm, which is what the cervical radiculopathy program and the neck pain program cover. OrthoInfo makes the same point from the other direction when it explains that a doctor examines the neck as well as the arm, because pinched nerves in the neck can cause similar symptoms. The base of the neck is the second, where nerves and blood vessels pass through a narrow space, and that is the thoracic outlet syndrome program.
The third is the wrist, and here the finger pattern earns its keep. The dividing line runs down the ring finger: its little finger half belongs to the ulnar nerve and its thumb half to the median nerve, which is the nerve squeezed in carpal tunnel syndrome at the wrist. If your tingling sits on the thumb side of the hand, carpal tunnel or cubital tunnel: which nerve maps the territories properly and deals with a hand that feels numb all over.
Why you cannot settle this at home
An examination reaches things a description cannot, and OrthoInfo's account of assessing the ulnar nerve shows what that means. Feeling and strength are checked through the hand and the individual fingers. The clinician looks at whether the nerve shifts out of its groove as the elbow bends, which is not something you can feel on yourself. The neck, shoulder, elbow and wrist are each put into positions to see which one reproduces your symptoms, and there is a second arm to compare everything against.
The funny bone tap is the test people try at home, and it is the clearest example of why home testing fails. OrthoInfo describes tapping over the nerve there, with a shock running into the ring and little fingers as a pointer toward an irritated nerve. The same page says that shock can also come from a nerve that is behaving perfectly normally. A sign that turns up in healthy people tells you nothing about yourself, which is why it belongs in an examination as one piece of a larger set.
The same holds for the resisted wrist tests and the ligament stress tests described in online videos. A clinician reads those against everything else they have found, including your other arm. On your own, you get a sensation with nothing to compare it to, and usually a sorer elbow.
What you can do beats all of it. Two columns on a sheet of paper: in one, the jobs that hurt the elbow, with what you were gripping and for how long; in the other, the times your fingers tingled, which fingers, how long it lasted, and what the elbow was folded over at the time. Add how many weeks or months this has been going on, and whether one hand or both. If one column is far fuller than the other, say so out loud, because that is information nobody else can collect for you.
The nerve signs that change the timetable
Which problem it turns out to be can wait for an appointment. Some of what follows cannot, and it applies whichever answer you get.
Two things need emergency help rather than an appointment. The stroke signs, including sudden numbness or weakness down one side, a drooping face or speech that comes out slurred or muddled, need emergency services even if they pass off. An arm, hand or set of fingers that turns cold, pale, blue or gray compared with the other side needs emergency services or an emergency department straight away, because the blood supply to the arm may be blocked. Both lines are on the list below in full. A reader who has just learned that golfer's elbow can cause numb fingers has been handed a reason to wait, and those two lines exist to take it away again.
Below that, nerve symptoms have their own timings. Pins and needles in your arm or hand that do not go away after you stop, or part of the arm or hand going numb, needs medical advice the same day. Tingling brought on by an exercise means stopping that exercise straight away, with the full wording and the follow-up timing on the list below.
A hand that is getting weaker, fingers that feel clumsy, or muscle that looks thinner than on the other side needs a doctor within a few days. For symptoms in the ring and little fingers that come and go, OrthoInfo advises seeing a doctor if they are severe, or if milder symptoms have lasted more than 6 weeks. Numbness that is there the whole time belongs on the same-day line above rather than on that six week one.
The NHS sets a low bar for being seen at all, which is worth knowing if you have been talking yourself out of an appointment. Its page on pins and needles says to see a GP if you constantly have pins and needles or it keeps coming back. Its page on elbow and arm pain puts an arm that tingles or feels numb on the list for an urgent treatment center or an emergency department. And if your symptoms began with a fall or a blow to the elbow rather than gradually, the injury lines below come first, before anything else on this page.
Related exercise programs
Warning signs
Get emergency help now
- Emergency: any sign of a stroke, even if it goes away. That means a face that droops on one side, an arm you cannot lift or keep up, slurred or muddled speech, weakness or numbness on one side of your body or face, sudden blurred vision, double vision or loss of sight, trouble swallowing, sudden dizziness with unsteadiness or falling over, a sudden severe headache, or a sudden fall where your legs give way but you do not black out (a drop attack). Call emergency services straight away.
- Chest pain or tightness, which may spread to your arm, neck or jaw, or shoulder or arm pain that comes with shortness of breath, sweating or feeling sick. This can be a heart attack. Call emergency services straight away.
- Your arm, hand or fingers turn cold, pale, blue or gray compared with the other side. Call emergency services or go to an emergency department straight away, and do not drive yourself. The blood supply to the arm may be blocked.
- Emergency: after a fall or a blow to the elbow, the arm has changed shape or sits at an odd angle, a bone is showing through the skin, a cut is bleeding heavily, or the hand has gone numb or tingly or turns cold, pale or blue. Go to an emergency department or call emergency services straight away, and do not drive yourself.
- The pain started with a fall or a blow to the elbow, and the pain is severe, you heard a snap, the elbow is swollen or bruised, or you cannot bend or straighten the arm. Go to an urgent care center or emergency department the same day.
Get help today
- Same day: you throw, and you heard a pop or felt a sudden snap on the inside of the elbow, followed by pain, a throw you could not finish, or an elbow that feels loose or unstable. Stop throwing straight away and get the elbow checked the same day, because the ligament on the inner side of the elbow (ulnar collateral ligament) may be injured, and in a thrower who is still growing the same pop can be a piece of bone pulled off the inside of the elbow. If the thrower is a child or teenager, go to an urgent care center or emergency department the same day, because that needs an X-ray.
- Pins and needles in your arm or hand that do not go away after you stop, or part of your arm or hand goes numb. Get medical advice the same day. If one side of your face or body suddenly goes numb or weak, or your speech becomes slurred or muddled, call emergency services, even if it goes away.
- The elbow is hot, red and swollen, or you have elbow pain with a high temperature or feel hot, cold or shivery. Get medical advice the same day, and go to an emergency department if you feel very unwell. This can be a sign of infection in the joint, which needs treatment quickly.
Book an appointment
- Tingling, pins and needles or numbness in your hand, most often in the ring and little fingers (from the nerve behind the elbow, the ulnar nerve) or in the thumb, index and middle fingers (the median nerve). Stop the exercise you are doing straight away. If it settles within a few minutes of stopping, leave that exercise out and ask your physio, surgeon or fracture clinic before you try it again, within a few days. If it does not settle after you stop, get medical advice the same day.
- Your hand is getting weaker, you keep dropping things, your fingers feel clumsy, or the web of muscle between your thumb and index finger, or the little finger side of your palm, looks thinner or hollow compared with your other hand. This can mean the nerve behind the elbow is being squeezed. See a doctor within a few days. If the weakness is getting worse from day to day, get medical advice the same day.
- You have numbness, tingling or pins and needles in your hand or fingers, most often the ring and little fingers. Stop any exercise that brings it on and see a physio or doctor. For the ring and little fingers, OrthoInfo advises seeing a doctor if the symptoms are severe, or if milder symptoms have lasted more than 6 weeks.
- Pain spreads from your neck down the arm, or turning or tilting your neck brings on the arm pain. See a physio or doctor, because the problem may be in the neck rather than the elbow.
Common questions
Can golfer's elbow cause a numb pinky?
It can, and the little finger is one of the two fingers to expect it in. OrthoInfo's page on golfer's elbow says some patients also develop numbness and tingling in their ring and pinky fingers, and explains it by irritation of the nearby ulnar nerve, which runs behind the same bony point the sore tendon attaches to. So a numb pinky does not mean your golfer's elbow diagnosis was wrong, and it does not confirm it either. What it does mean is that the nerve needs looking at as well as the tendon, and that the timings in the warning list at the foot of this page now apply to you. OrthoInfo's advice for numbness in those two fingers is to see a doctor if the symptoms are severe, or if milder symptoms have lasted more than 6 weeks.
Is golfer's elbow the same as ulnar nerve entrapment?
No, they are two different problems that happen to be neighbors. Ulnar nerve entrapment at the elbow is the medical name for cubital tunnel syndrome, and it means the nerve itself is squeezed or stretched where it passes the inner elbow. Golfer's elbow, or medial epicondylitis, is wear in the tendon of the forearm muscles that bend the wrist and turn the palm down. The names get mixed up because the two sit a finger's width apart and because both are described as inner elbow problems. They are also not mutually exclusive: Konarski and colleagues (2023) classify medial epicondylitis into two subtypes, one without ulnar involvement and one with it.
What helps a pinched nerve in the elbow?
Mostly changing what the elbow is doing, rather than anything you do to it. OrthoInfo's advice for the ulnar nerve is to avoid long spells with the elbow bent and to stop leaning on it or pressing on the inner arm, and it notes that many people sleep with the elbow bent and wake with numb fingers. The cubital tunnel syndrome program goes through those daytime habits and the night position properly, and sets out what the research does and does not support, which is worth reading before you buy anything. The site also has an ulnar nerve glide page, listed here so you recognize the exercise if you come across it, not as something to give yourself. Whether a glide, a splint or a strap belongs in your case is for the clinician who examines you.
Should I stop my golfer's elbow exercises if my fingers tingle?
Stop that exercise, yes, and do not simply push through it. Tingling, pins and needles or numbness in the hand is a nerve symptom rather than the ordinary tendon discomfort a loading program can produce, and the warning list below gives the full wording with the timings attached. In short: stop straight away, and if it settles within a few minutes, leave that exercise out and ask your physio, surgeon or fracture clinic before trying it again, within a few days. If it does not settle after you stop, get medical advice the same day. Your physio can usually swap the exercise for one that loads the same muscles with the elbow in a different position, so stopping one movement rarely means stopping the program. If you have had surgery on the elbow, follow the program your surgeon or physio gives you rather than this one.
References
- American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Medial epicondylitis (golfer's elbow). OrthoInfo. https://www.orthoinfo.org/en/diseases--conditions/medial-epicondylitis-golfers-elbow/
- American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Cubital tunnel syndrome (ulnar nerve entrapment at the elbow). OrthoInfo. https://www.orthoinfo.org/en/diseases--conditions/ulnar-nerve-entrapment-at-the-elbow/
- Konarski W, Poboży T, Poboży K, Domańska J, Konarska K. Current concepts of natural course and in management of medial epicondylitis: a clinical overview. Orthopedic Reviews. 2023;15. https://doi.org/10.52965/001c.84275
- NHS. Pins and needles. Page last reviewed 4 January 2024. https://www.nhs.uk/symptoms/pins-and-needles/
- NHS. Elbow and arm pain. Page last reviewed 26 January 2024. https://www.nhs.uk/symptoms/elbow-and-arm-pain/
- NHS. Broken arm or wrist. Page last reviewed 2 October 2026. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/broken-arm-or-wrist/
- NHS. Septic arthritis. Page last reviewed 3 September 2026. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/septic-arthritis/
- NHS. Symptoms of a stroke. Page last reviewed 12 September 2024. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stroke/symptoms/
Written and checked by the PocketPhysio editorial team. Last updated 2026-10-18.
This page is general education, not a diagnosis or a personal treatment plan. See a physiotherapist or doctor for advice about your own situation.