Why Your Tendons Never Heal (And How To Fix Them)

Creaky clicky joints are not just a normal part of training, and if it keeps coming back, problem isn't your muscles or bones, it's your tendons.

It's the number one thing that causes people pain.

Today I'll show you the two biggest mistakes damaging your tendons and the exact exercises proven to rebuild stronger ones in as little as 30 days. Think of tendons as the cables that make your body move, whether it's lifting your forearm up during a curl pulling your arm across your body during a bench press, or swinging your elbow when you hit a tennis ball. But movement isn't their only job.

Imagine that you jump down off of a couple of stairs and you landed on both feet. Well, when you land on the ground, you don't want your muscle to take on all of the load.

That's Coach Q Wylie, a physiotherapist who spent years studying tendons and applying this research with professional athletes.

So a tendon can be very protective of muscle in that it can basically stretch out quite a bit. In a very fast, short period of time that allows the muscle to not have to extend as quickly.

Which just means your tendons need to be absurdly strong. And even though lifting weights is great for building your muscles, your tendons need a different type of training.

The biggest thing that we're discovering now is that tendons don't like what muscle likes to get stronger.

That's Dr. Keith Barr, a professor at UC Davis whose lab has produced some of the world's most cited research on tendon healing and strength.

And so there's a big difference in the types of loads that we do to optimize tendon versus when we're trying to target our exercise for muscles or our heart.

So if all your training builds up your muscles faster than your tendons, it creates a big gap in strength, which explains why it's the number one thing that causes people pain.

So I do a lot of work with professional sports team because 70% of their injuries are related to the tendon. And it— either the tendon or the muscle that was associated with it not being perfectly aligned.

This is actually why guys who hop on steroids are usually more likely to get tendon injuries. Their muscles outgrow the strength of their tendons. And we see the same trend in professional sports.

1990s baseball, where everybody was injecting themselves with anabolic steroids, they would get big muscles and then they would tear the, the tendon. Their performance go up and then bang, and you You know, statisticians can go back and, and determine who is taking steroids based on their stats because it's that predictable.

But you don't need to be on the juice for this to happen. And even if you're not in pain, there are warning signs that some of your tendons are just not as strong as they should be. Oh my God, that's loud. Hear that?

When a tendon is experiencing any kind of sensitive thing, it will get a little bit fatter. You know, it's a chubby tendon, if you will. And so now in the shoulder particularly, you're asking that tendon to move and slide through very, very narrow joint spaces. And so just a little bit of a fatter tendon, now you may feel that tendon as it pops and rolls.

Now, clicking alone doesn't always mean your tendon is weak or damaged, but when it starts coming with pain, that's a different story. And one of the worst things you can do when that happens is rest.

The doctor says, well, just rest it. But a tendon isn't a tendon without load. So if you're just resting it, it's never going to fix itself.

Unlike most injuries, tendons don't respond well to complete rest. The pain might temporarily go away because nothing's stressing it, but the actual problem isn't being fixed. In fact, the healthy parts of the tendon start actually getting weaker while the damaged part never properly rebuilds.

As a result, as soon as you start doing anything again, the pain is going to come back because you didn't actually fix the problem.

And this only gets worse as you age.

When we're young and healthy and we're doing all of these activities, those little injuries never go away unless we actually fix them. That's why a lot of people who are super active and are training really hard, and then they'll get into their 40s and they'll have a lot of kind of musculoskeletal pain.

Okay, so rest doesn't work. But before I show you what does, the exact exercises for each joint that can get rid of pain instantly and rebuild you stronger tendons in as little as 30 days, you need to understand the two biggest mistakes causing your tendon problems in the first place. The first and most common one is poor load management. Think back to a time when you suddenly increase your activity. Whether it's more bench pressing, running, or a new sport. It feels fine at first until after a few weeks, something gives.

It's less about being an overuse-related injury. It's more of an underprepared-related injury. And more is just more. We can adapt to more. It just takes a long time. Tendons take a little bit longer to adapt than muscle.

And I actually experienced this myself. I ran a 60-day experiment where I trained one half of my body with really heavy weights for low reps and the other half with lightweight for high reps. By the end of it, I got tendonitis on both my elbow and knee on my heavy side. Now, it's not because heavy weight is bad, but just because my body wasn't used to that type of training.

If you're increasing volumes or intensity by more than probably about 30%, that you're potentially running the risk of injury.

So if you normally do 4 sets of bench per week and hop on a new program that has you doing 10, that's a recipe for injury. A 30% jump is at most adding 1 to 2 sets per week. And the same goes with load. If you're coming back from time off and 100 pounds feels easy, Don't jump straight to 150 the next week. Go closer to 130 and slowly build from there. And you can also apply this concept to any exercise or sport you do outside the gym too. But there is another more subtle mistake that almost everyone does that damages their tendons.

When we're lifting a lot, what happens, especially as we're trying to up our weights, is that we have a tendency to use more momentum.

Momentum is what you use whenever you bounce the weight off your chest when pressing, bounce out of the bottom of a squat, or even hit a tennis ball or swing a golf club.

That's the stimulus that's going to be detrimental to our connective tissues. We're doing the things that are actually introducing the type of load that is hardest on our tendons.

Now, even though Olympic weightlifters use momentum all the time in their lifts, their tendons have adapted to it over time. Yours hasn't. So as a general rule of thumb in the gym, if you don't have specific power or strength goals, control the bottom of the rep. It'll not only be easier on your tendons, but research also suggests it'll grow your muscles faster too. But even if you manage your training perfectly, tendon injuries still happen. And luckily, there is one type of exercise proven to be one of the best ways to heal and build stronger tendons.

What our work has shown us is that when we do isometrics, we maximize the creep in the tendon and we get equal signal for that load through the whole tendon, including the scarred area. By 2 weeks, almost everybody is, is like, oh yeah, I, I don't— I can do pretty much everything again.

An isometric is any exercise where you're contracting a muscle without moving it, like flexing your bicep with your elbow stuck at 90 degrees.

So the reason that we use isometrics is because if I pull and hold, what's going to happen is that's going to cause creep to the healthy strong parts of the tendon, and as they lengthen, the next strongest part gets loaded, then the next strongest, then the weakest part will get it. So if we hold it about 30 seconds, now the whole tendon gets a signal. Now we're gonna get collagen synthesis. It's gonna happen in a line fashion, and we're gonna make that tissue stronger.

As for what isometric exercises are best, whatever motion doesn't feel good, you're trying to find a way that you can load that motion very hard, um, or hold a position. So for example, if I had a problem bench pressing, I'm going to probably use something pretty similar to a bench press and just do an iso hold there because that's the motion that's most sensitive, meaning that I know that that's probably the motion that that tendon is getting the most load.

Let me show you what this looks like for each joint using exercises we actually just added to our fitness app, starting with the shoulder. If chest pressing is what bothers you, set up a bench press, Smith machine, or chest press machine with enough weight so that you can push hard against it without the weight moving. Another option too is just using a lighter weight and holding it halfway through the rep. And if you're training at home, you can do the same thing with a push-up hold or by pushing hard against the wall. But pick one of these variations, hold the position for at least 30 seconds, and repeat that for a total of 3 sets. Whereas if your shoulder mainly hurts during overhead presses, try these instead. And if it hurts during lateral raise movements then try these. And before we move to the elbow, just keep in mind that while you should feel temporary pain relief right after you do these exercises, you might actually feel some pain as you're doing them, and that's perfectly fine as long as the pain is not more than a 3 or 4 out of 10, and as long as it doesn't feel worse the next day. If it does, that's a sign you got to ease back by using less weight or just not pushing as hard. Now, as for your elbows, if it's mainly your biceps that hurt, Pick whatever type of curl bothers it the most and hold the middle position of it with lighter weight and do the same if it hurts during pulldowns or chin-ups. Whereas for triceps, do these if it hurts during pushdowns and these if it hurts during overhead extensions.

As for your knees, knee extension machine is probably just the most simple, most accessible. If you didn't have a machine, getting your toes to be the only thing that are on the floor and your back and your bum are now up against the wall and simply sliding down the wall with your back and letting the knees come forward is also going to recreate create a very similar knee extension type thing.

So here is the full plan to completely heal and rebuild your tendons as fast as possible. First, pick one exercise based on what joint is bothering you and do 3 sets of it twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. Your pain can go away in as quick as a week or two just from that. But to then fix the issue for good, Keith recommends continuing to do your exercises 3 to 4 times a week for at least 4 to 8 weeks.

If they feel like, oh yeah, hey, it's better, and then they stop doing it It's just going to come back. So that's why the ones who really get rid of the pain permanently are the ones who can say, this is something I want to keep going with.

But again, don't stop there. If you want to keep your tendons healthy for good and prevent future injuries, you can spend 5 to 10 minutes after your workouts to do these exercises or just allocate one day per week. But if you want a step-by-step plan that takes care of all that guesswork for you, we've actually added these tendon rehab exercises directly into our app. Along with joint-friendly exercise alternatives based on the specific area that's bothering you. That way you can continue training and continue building muscle while rebuilding your tendons at the same time. Now, the app also coaches you on your diet, and you can try 2 weeks completely free by scanning this QR code or heading to buildwithscience.com. Give this video a watch next if you want to learn the fastest way to put on muscle. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.