This paper presents a simple and efficient way to calculate the ratcheting strains at the critical locations of a pressurized elbow subjected to cycles of in-plane opening/closing. To do so, a kinematics initially proposed by Boussaa and al. [Finite pure bending of curved pipes. 1996. Comput. Struct. 60, 1003-1012] is presented and a way to use it in ANSYS finite element software is described. The kinematics only describes the elbow behavior when it is subjected to pure in-plane bending. The considered loading must be an history of imposed moment or elbow angle variation. Results using this kinematics are compared with experimental and numerical results of two papers from the literature. Values of ratcheting strains at critical locations of the elbow obtained with the proposed kinematics are very comparable with the ones of the literature. Moreover, computation time is divided by around 200 when using this kinematics over a shell finite element model.