How To Strengthen Your Tendons

So today, what I'm going to share with you, I believe is potentially the most important lesson that any strength coach, any athlete can learn. I wish I'd have learned more about this. I wish it had been a key subject. I wish there had been a whole semester about it at university because it really is at the foundation of performance and the key why there's so many injuries athletes are suffering. To overcome tendon issues is really a true blessing and gift. So I'm going to show you a little bit to start with. So you see just extreme tendon ability. Strength can't do this, Right? So there's obviously balance and skill involved in this as well. But for the most extreme performance, extreme tension is necessary and the tendons are going to deal with that tension. So another example here of extreme tendon ability. Stefan Holm, the highest jumper relative to his own height measured on high jump. There may be some, some bigger jumpers in the dunking world or the parkour world. Look at the fluency, look at the ease with which he's getting over these targets. So no amount of powerlifting is going to facilitate this. Yes, we need to strength train, but the tendons are essential for this. It's just not possible without extreme tendon ability. Phenomenal. So we'll see the actual performance here. Boom. Relative to his body height, the highest jumper in history, 181cm. Not meant to be able to do that. How can you do that? And let's take it to the other end of the spectrum with a heavy athlete who weren't a Gunther here. I watched this in my early 20s, put onto it by Hayden Knowles. He sent me that. He gave me the VHS to watch and I watched it a bunch of times, seeing a big guy like this fluid in his movement. Now, he was a shot putter. There was a huge emphasis and a huge importance placed on tendon ability. Even the best power lifters, the slowest power lifters, the heaviest power lifters, which is power lifters wearing suits, value this ability to store energy in the tendon and release that energy. Okay, so this is a big guy. This is what we need to be aiming for with heavy athletes. They still should have that tendon ability. So if we can place as a priority, if we can understand the importance of it, then then we can start to deal with it better. Extremes of tendon ability and really we need to be considering fascia, ligament, bone. All of these structures need to be able to deal with extreme forces. They're all adaptable, but they adapt much more slowly than muscles okay, so here we've got Devon, Devon Larratt. And you go through, go through his whole regime preparation for arm wrestling. This is how he trains. He's done more than 80 kilo partial curl. And he talks about training the bone, he talks about getting creaking in the bone where the bone is literally considering breaking. You can feel it on other wrestlers. Interestingly, he's training three times a day in preparation. When he's got something coming up, sometimes it's sets of 50, sometimes it sets a 3. This is extremes of tendon loading, ligaments, fascia, bone. How much can these structures adapt? How should we be training them? The more questions than answers. Still the man himself, knees over toes guy, Ben Patrick, jumping depth, jump off the ladder. So it's all the bones of the feet as well as the tendons and the ligaments. The jump height is based on the tendons. The ability to receive all that force is going through all of those structures. So you might be able to squat. Someone might be able to squat three times body weight, four times body weight. The forces will never equal the forces, the instantaneous forces in something like that jump. And you'll see, even with bouncing these weights, when he's got, you know, 60, 70, 80 kilos on these pulleys and they're, and they're jerking and bouncing, then the momentary force that's there is extremely high. And only tenants, only connective tissues can deal with with these things. So we need to be looking for, if we can establish. Okay, yes, definitely. You know, tendons are where elite performance happens and how does it all kind of mix together? And tenants are the foundation for extreme performance. And then how do we look after those tenants is what we're also going to answer in this one today. So tendons, you think? Let's think of them as adaptive springs. Okay. So if you look at the foam on the left, the memory foam, or if we look at the natural latex on the right, maybe this is a trained tendon versus an untrained tendon, with the trained tendon being on the right. The ability to give back and to utilize the, the force that is being received. Okay, so maybe this is what we really, really need to be able to develop. So it's then muscles and momentum that are going to load these springs. If we accept the tendon as being a biological adaptive spring, then it's muscles or momentum that is going to load those springs. So if we look back to the Stefan home example, he doesn't necessarily have to have amazing acceleration and deceleration. He wouldn't have been terrible. But he doesn't have to be amazing in those things because you can slowly build up to the launch in the high jump, right? So when momentum is allowed, even in 100 meter sprints, etc, you know, we'll see. Some of the guys are quite thin. That's because they don't need to be able to stop and start. Okay, so the more we need to load the springs ourselves and the less that we can allow momentum and gravity to load the springs, then the more muscle we need. Okay, so for shot put, more muscle needed. For weightlifters, more muscle needed. But the tendons are always still the foundation for extreme performance. We need that tenant ability when we just muscle the weight. That's why bodybuilders, you know, can't perform much in a, in jumps and weightlifting when the tendons are required because that tendon ability, they're on that memory foam, right? The bodybuilder is the memory foam and then the athlete, the phenomenal athlete is that natural latex. So as a strength coach, then someone like Charles Poliquin, who put a lot of muscle mass on people, well, he gave them the ability to load these springs and then they already had healthy springs because they were already competing at the highest level, you know, in their sport. And so adding muscle to them helped them to load abilities that they already had. Now there are other coaches, if you look at the Marinovic system that are very tendon focused, you still want to be very physics focused. So you want to look at the hardware versus the software. There's training then that's just software training. That's kind of crap, it's kind of dance. Men run faster than women on average. 16 year old boys run faster than 14 year old boys. This is because of force, this is because of muscle. This is because of the ability to put load into these springs, right? So we always want to tend towards those qualities. Both of them are extremely important. But we have to look at, well, how much can momentum contribute to this? If momentum can contribute a lot, then we don't need that much muscle. But if the body has to kind of get it done to initiate the loading into the tendons, then we need the muscles. Okay, so reversal strength is then the key. Muscle and tendon work together to reverse loads. Amortization, the transition between the down and up, between the eccentric and the concentric, is both the killer and the king. It's where things snap and it's where greatness comes about. So amortization, that transition between the down phase and the up phase, between the eccentric and the concentric, that's where champions are made or lost. Can you do it with really, really light loads? Can you do it with really, really heavy loads? Depends on the sport, which abilities we need to be better at. But that ability to transfer load, to stop it and to reverse its direction, that is human movement, human ability. That is the ability to sprint at high speed. That is the ability to pull a massive weight overhead and then get under it and stand up with it. So we can either, if we have more time to produce the force, then we need more, then muscle can play a bigger role. Right. So when there's a fraction of a second, so looking at top speed, running extremely short ground contact times going to be very tendon dominant. Okay. So as we go from the 100 meters, where the acceleration phase is still a big part of the race and very important athletes will get lighter as we go from the hundred meters to the 200 meters to the 400 meters, the 400 meter runners are more slight because they're relying more on their tendons. They can't afford to be carrying as much muscle, very short ground contact times and they can't, you know, they have to rely on tendon, they can't rely on muscle. Yeah. So the more ground contact time there is, the more load tolerant they have to be, the more, the better dealing with loads people have to be. So when there's a lot of change in direction, even for soccer, soccer players have to be built thicker than high jumpers or long jumpers or Even generally then 400 meter runners because they want to be able to stop and start. And if you look at the best physicality in soccer, Adama Traore, you know, Messi Ronaldo, they're not super skinny, they're not massive bodybuilders, but they have decent amount of muscle mass in the legs because they need to be able to start and stop. So they need to be able to load their own tendons and the muscles are what load the tendons. Okay. So the more ground contact time we're allowed, the more muscle and the more strength is going to play a role. We must work out how to work, how to load them more. All right, so if we know that they're so important, then how are we going to load them up? If they are healthy, what are we going to do with them to get the most out of them? Strength, muscle, that's what loads the tendons. Right. So if we have healthy tendons, then getting more and more muscular force, more output from the muscle. More muscle recruitment. Whether that means more mass or not is a separate decision and it depends on other factors. Right. The ideal body composition. If you watch the Hardware vs. Software lecture, you know, you get a better understanding for that. But if the tenon is healthy, then we want more and more force to be produced from the muscle. Momentum is loading the tendons. Momentum takes time. Strength can be, can be created instantaneously. And that's why we want that muscular force to be able to contribute as well. So if you're challenging your tendon limits, some people's tendons just can't take the volume required for, for bodybuilding. This is an idea that's been thrown around quite a lot. I consider for myself. Oh yeah, maybe that's, that's it. Maybe I just can't handle the amount of volume that is required to build to, you know, natural muscular mass limit. Kind of the my muscle mass ceiling, getting to the, you know, the natty number type thing. Maybe I can't handle the amount of volume that's required. You know, this is a limiting belief. So let's challenge some of these limiting beliefs around tenants. I don't believe that's true. I just think we don't understand. We haven't understood how to look after tenants, how to manage tenants, and that's what we're going to go through so that we can overcome this limiting belief. Number one, tendons and connective tissues have a mileage limit. You often hear these kind of ideas. People say it about cartilage and things as well. Oh, they've just worn it out. No, these, we're biologically adaptive organisms. If we're given the right stimulus, the body will repair itself, it will regrow. You know, Ben is a great example of this knees over toes guy. Six surgeries on his knees now jumping, dunking, training, day in, day out, with performance levels that are equal to or above many elite professional athletes. When he was considered to have no genetic potential, called the old man, you know, unable to get anything done to be able to, you know, even get on the court to play college basketball. It was, was a real challenge for him. He missed out on so much opportunity because he couldn't get it done as far as repairing tendons. Now his ability is shown that. His ability shows that, you know, we can adapt, we can return. It's not about mileage, it's about getting the progression right. And if we can force adaptation or encourage adaptation in the right direction, then we can get to where we want to go to. Another key factor Here for the tendons is that if it fits your macros mentality, like any food, as long as you get enough energy, you'll be fine. When we're looking at tendons, when we're looking at connective tissue quality, when we're looking at bone quality, when we're looking at muscle quality, it matters what those things are made out of. Every engineer, you know, every structural engineer is concerned with the quality of the materials. It matters biologically the quality of materials that are being used. You know, try making an amazing world class athlete, world class athlete out of rice bubbles and pop tarts. People want to say it doesn't matter as long as the macros are right. You know, eat soy protein, you know, live on soy oil and live on high fructose corn syrup and see what happens. You know, if you choose, there's three macros. If that's all you need, hit your macros, then do that and see what happens. You know, you're going to die. You're definitely not going to have high quality connective tissues and performance. So if you take the thing to the extreme, then you start to get closer to the truth. If you go to that extreme of very, very bad diet and you see what happens at that point, then you know, well, yeah, the opposite is probably also true. If you put exactly what the body needs, if you, if you got it perfectly right, would you increase the integrity, the quality of the, of the tissues? And of course you would. And our ancestors all knew this as well. And other animals instinctively eat, you know, for their health and for their, their body to repair themselves. So number four, if you eat a lot, you're going to get what you tend to need. This is kind of the same concept. You know, just eating a lot of food doesn't mean you're getting what your tendons need. The tendons need glycine, proline. Some people talk about vitamin C as being key. It's a bit confusing with vitamin C, but there are certain things that connective tissues are made from tendons and so we need to put those things in the blood if they're going to make their way into the right tissues. So it matters what we eat. And often this isn't part of the message that's it is becoming more well known and it's good that researchers is finally agreeing with what western a price and nutritional experts have been saying for decades from a traditional health understanding. Now the best of sports science is preaching this over the last couple of years talking about collagen and gelatin, glycine proline. Okay. So the idea of resting, the idea of ice, the idea of traditional strength training being the solution or just managing load, these are not the only solutions. They can also be a negative. Generally, if rest doesn't work straight away, then tendons kind of get stale and they need that freshness that comes from fresh blood in the area. So rest, if it doesn't work initially, it's probably not going to work. Sometimes if something's very acute, if it's the first time it's been aggravated, then it can be given a couple of days to recover. And for sure, relative rest is important. And we're going to go through how to give relative rest without complete rest so the tendon doesn't become stale and stagnate with damaged cells that aren't being cleared. We now know that ice is not really part of the solution. Slows down the healing process, stops the natural healing and inflammation that should be coming to an area when there's been damage. Strength training, squat bench deadlift is not the solution for tenants. It is a huge part of the problem. And just trying to find the magical amount of the wrong stuff to do is what load management is about. Like, if you're doing the wrong stuff, yeah, if you do less of it, then that will to some degree help. But like, let's just actually do the right stuff. Let's understand what's going on and let's improve it. So, you know, yeah, load management definitely has a role to play, but we need more dexterity and control and that's what we're going to get as we go through more of the tenant solutions here. So lifting fast isn't needed for maximum strength. This is kind of a limiting belief. People think as long as, you know, as long as you're getting strong, everything's going to be okay. Just to, you know, the heavy strength work when it's really the fast stuff and amortization, the ability to reverse loads that will prepare the tendon for high loading and also facilitate elite performance. So let's look at the properties of the tendon. The first thing is the viscoelastic quality of tendons. All right, so viscoelasticity is like when you, if you dive into water and you land flat on your Belly off a 3 meter platform, you're going to have a very red belly. It feels like landing on concrete. If you land from 10 meters like that and land straight on your head, then you know, you could have serious, serious injury. So with extreme speed and loading, it's basically like concrete that's what our tendons are like, they're very hard with extremely fast loading. But if they loaded slowly, kind of like water, you can just, you know, you can enter, they displace. So tendons are like this. That's why the very high speed stuff is where they're challenged the most. And high load. So the concept of creep, tendons creep. It's like if you wear a T shirt and you stretch the T shirt, there's a certain amount, you can stretch it where it'll go back and then there's a point beyond that where it's not going to go back, where it just starts to change the T shirt. Okay. So tenants have that quality of with enough load and enough time, they deform and they stay in that newer shape. And that's something that we need to research more and understand more. But there's definitely. It appears as though there is magic in initiating creepy with heavy loads and time under stretch in tendons, something is happening to those tendons. Most likely they're just being challenged and becoming thicker, becoming stronger. We're seeing it over and over again within the ATG system where the tendons are being loaded, we're gaining new range and they're being challenged. And then without much jumping practice or no jumping practice, people go back on the court and they jump higher than they could before. So the tendon has improved its ability. They're stronger, but then not only do they not get the pain, but they can actually perform better. Now at some point, you want to be able to do both. Of course, you want to still have some jumping practice or some top speed running practice that uses the tendons. But there's something going on with this process of, of heavy loading under stretch that is doing good. So the creep is not infinite. You can't just stretch and stretch and stretch the tendon and the tendon just becomes like long and saggy. That. That doesn't happen. That can't happen. Even if you look at, you know, some of the most mobile athletes, whether you look at, you know, people like Cloakov and Ehab and their extreme power despite being extremely mobile, or look at rhythmic gymnasts who have contortionist ability. But they're still, you know, they're athletic. They can do, you know, do flips and, and all those sorts of things. So it's impossible to stretch to a point where you lose power. Maybe there are fractions here and it's, it's an interesting question to propose, you know, at those extremes of contortionism, maybe there is A loss of power. But maybe there isn't as well. It seems more like there isn't than that there is even at those extremes. So the other things that tendons do is attach hard surfaces to soft. So the muscle is soft, the bone is hard. And in engineering that's a very difficult feat. If you're going to attach a hard surface to a soft, something soft, and then apply a lot of force to it, that's a very difficult feat. So that's why the tendon is generally the site of injury. And it's really the key. The focus of where elite performance is created is generated. So understanding how to manipulate tendon, how to look after the tendon, is really at the heart of elite performance. And we're trying to support this structure that has a very difficult task to do to attach the bone to the muscle. And there are smooth transitions between where tendon becomes bone and where tenon becomes muscle. The cells are kind of intermingled, but yeah, it's a difficult thing. It's also important when we look at tendons. Consider baseline health. We know that glycation, blood sugar fluctuation is a big risk factor in tendon issues. I believe that for myself. But the tendon issues that started for me in my preteens, I think I had my first tendon overuse, you know, tendon bone injury at 10 years old. And I'm basically. I've had some sort of tendon bone issue ever since then. I've always loved sport. I've always been fairly competitive and gone 100% at things. I believe that blood sugar issues were a huge part of why I've always had those issues. Lymphatic system challenges, toxicity in the system are also part of this problem with tendons. And we know that when people take antibiotics, they can also have an increase in Achilles tendon rupture risk and inflammatories. Anything that interferes with the inflammatory response and the immune response is going to impact tendons as well. So we need to look at this holistic perspective as well. Make sure there's enough protein in the diet, enough collagen, as I've said before, glycine rich foods. The liver needs to be healthy. Using fasting and carbohydrate manipulation can really be important things to improve tendon health and, you know, moving things around inside the lymphatic system. So sauna can be good for this. Hot cold can be good for lymphatic system. Skin rubbing, brushing techniques, the gua sha, and a lot of those sorts of Fat tool. And those things related to moving around the lymphatic fluid that bathes the tendons. Right. So I've heard of people having autopsies on and when a tendon is a chronic tendon, issue exists on autopsy. The tendon is like gangrenous green, just sludgy and yuck. So the idea of moving fresh fluid into the area, they have very low blood supply, so you're trying to get blood around that area. But moving all the lymphatic fluid is a key part of potentially healing and overcoming these things. So we want to do as many things right as we can. So to challenge our tendons, then we're going to challenge them with high speed movements, with reactive movements, with things that are very heavy mechanics. And joint angles are also going to challenge tendons. If we're loading them from angles that they're not used to or, or not designed for, then that's going to present a challenge. The spikes in volume are also going to challenge tendons. Right. So using very low loads can be a way to regenerate the tendon and support the tendon and not challenge. But that seems to be better than rest is low loading. If you look at the Westside Bible system, they will encourage their athletes to do 300 tricep extensions each day. 200 hamstring curls, banded hamstring curls. They have these baselines of activity, sled dragging, reverse hyper, these baselines of activity that are all kind of elastic movements in a way, creating circulation, regenerating. Right. So the high speed stuff, the reactive stuff, this is what's going to challenge, what's going to flare up tenants. So if the tenant is sore, something probably happened along these lines. So in the short term, to reduce the issue, we want to apply heat. The body will heat naturally to bring life into the area. To encourage healing, we want to support with circulation, bringing circulation to the area through things like blood flow restriction training, just very light short range of motion or concentric dominant short range. If you watch the athletic range series, those kind of movements will bring life into the area. Stop doing what hurts is obviously part of the solution as well. But don't stop doing. Everything in that area generally tends to get a better result. So long term we want to look at the muscle tendon length. If we can improve the muscle tendon length, then that seems to be alleviating a lot of issues. When people are able to do, you know, their human knee extension and to be able to get into those positions and nothing tears and the, the strength is there. And the tissue tolerance is there, then the tissue tolerance tends to be higher for other activities as well. So by getting to the strong in those lengthened positions, we often undo or create more surplus of tendon ability so we can get out and do other things. Lengthening the antagonist, so the opposite muscle. So if there is an issue with the knee, then we should also look at what's going on with the hamstring, what's going on with the glutes, what's going on with the calves. So what's going on on the other side of the body. So the knee tendons will have to work harder if the hamstrings are tighter. If you do take this to the forearms. So forearm issues, golfer's elbow, very common. People get into handstands or muscle ups, and oftentimes the issue is that the extensors. So because the back is getting so tight, there's always this resting tension. And so there's constantly too much tension in the forearm flexors. And that's part of the, the issue of why we get this golfer's elbow. So if we can take some tension out of the extensors or rebalance the joint, then we can alleviate some of those issues. And this is like the foundation of the structural balance system that Charles Poliquin popularized, and that is used very, very well within the ATG system. If you can lengthen the antagonist, then you get better muscle activation of the agonist, but you're also going to have healthier tendons on the other side. Right. So going lighter and going slower on the more irritating movements is also a way to be able to avoid the issue. And then, you know, gradually progressing with load, gradually progressing with speed to get back to what you, you really want to be able to do. So changing the, the mechanics or selecting different movements can also be part of the solution, depending on what you know, what can be changed there. If you're an arm wrestler, then maybe you can change your techniques and whatnot, especially while you're dealing with the injury. If you watch some of that, I watched some, some content from Devon Larratt that I that was there. Devin Larratt, the guy that I showed earlier, the arm wrestler and he spoke about, yeah, I had this injury, so then I had to learn to wrestle in a completely different way so that I could still wrestle, but that didn't, you know, damage the area that he had damaged before. Right. So he was, he learned a completely different set of mechanics to be able to overcome the injury. And then he was gradually overcame that and he became a better wrestler. So he didn't stop arm wrestling. He just found ways things that he could do that didn't cause aggravation and then got back and was better than ever before. So yeah, he can come from external sources, pumping the muscles, pumping the muscles below as well. So for knees, pumping the tibs and pumping the calves can really help with knee pain. People who have shoulder issues, pumping the biceps and triceps, if you have elbow issues, pumping the forearms can help. Okay, so this is very, you know, most people will notice that that makes a really positive difference. So we're always looking for what we can do that's going to get us back online. Like what is the most work that we can do without causing irritation or irritation that makes things worse. If we're getting a lot more work done and things aren't getting worse, then we're winning because we're going to get adaptation to the work that is done. Now if, if it is getting worse, then we need to scale it back. Ideally we're getting more work done and the issue is getting smaller. So using a lot of higher repetition, pain free movements, as I spoke about with the banded tricep extension and the seated hamstring curls, they're short range tricep and hamstring exercises. Those short range exercises bring a lot of circulation, bring a lot of heat into the area. Okay. So stretching the antagonist improves movement efficiency and you know, allows you to start accumulating load. So if we want to be able to get the glutes on, then we want to be able to stretch out. By stretching out the rear hip flexor in the split squat on the left, we're going to get better muscle activation in the seat of Good morning on the right. And that's part of overcoming the tendon issues is getting really good muscle activation. Okay, so the high volume of concentrics, you see the banded hamstring curls, So I'm going for short pauses on those ones. You see this show up. High volume of light concentric work is really the key for tendons. Right. So in the ATG system, this is reversing out knee pain. For gymnasts, this can be tendon circles, they call them for their shoulders and to help the shoulder stay healthy. I was listening to Rutger, one of the members with ATG real movement, talking about the Dutch swim team. If they do extra banded work, then they get a lot less shoulder issues. So even though they're swimming so much and the shoulders doing so much work, by doing extra banded work twice a Day bringing circulation into the area, keeping the muscle balance. They avoid a lot of shoulder issues in the west side system, as I've said a number of times. Also the sleds and the belt work. It's high volume, concentric, dominant light, maybe the abrasion, shaking. And some of these manual therapy techniques kind of have a similar effect of like flushing the area and creating some stimulus in the, in the tissues. So if we want to have these amazing tendons, what are we going to do? We need to progress load, we need to progress length and we need to progress speed. Now there's going to be a point with each of these where doing more becomes more of a risk. And, you know, we're getting diminishing returns. Having that foundation of daily circulation is what's going to help the tenants. Okay. With that as the underpinning, we can progress load, we can progress length, we can progress speed. As I said with Devon Larratt, he's. I keep changing his name. I don't know Devon Larratt. He, he's training three times a day with super high loads in a short range of motion. To be able to do that, you have to progress to it. Okay. So working towards heavier and heavier weights is going to mean that the tendons are more and more prepared. If you can get to those weights with less without causing irritation, then you're getting to a better place. Now the way the tempo that we use on the lift is also going to play a key role. If you're lowering the weight slowly, then you're favoring the muscle. If you jerk the weight, then you're going to favor the tendon and the forces are going to be much higher. Sequencing length, athletic range, short range, mid range, long range, extreme long range. So progressing through from short range to extreme long range allows us to gradually develop tendons. This is the concept of athletic range. The ATG system is the first system that I've seen that sequences length in this way. And I believe that that is at the heart of why there are now over 2000 success stories for the ATG system. So this is really at the heart of, of, you know, getting the tendons that you want is working through and understanding the sequencing of length, progressing the weight that you're using and then progressing speed or amortization. We want to be able to be reactive. Alright. So with these, we're trying to get a fast transition between down and up. It's maybe, I'm not sure, I think it's 100 kilos on here. Yeah, so you're trying to get that down, up phase, reverse the speed of the bar. So, yeah, it's 100 kilos. But think if I drop that 100 kilos off the floor onto someone's foot from my back, it's going to have a very different impact if I roll the bar over their foot and sit on their foot. So it's not just the weight, it's the tension we need to be looking at. So are we lifting with high tension or are we lifting with just heavy weights on the bar? For athletes, we want that tension because you might have 10 times body weight. I was listening to one of the guys in the group, Kieran, talking about, in downhill skiing, you're getting four times body weight on one leg. So each leg needs to be able to handle 4 times body weight, 8 times body weight. Is anyone squatting 8 times body weight? No. So they, they've got that sort of force. I think there's 50 turns. So 50 times in like 60 seconds, something like that. Was the numbers in the, in the slalom, one of the slaloms, it's just only possible with extreme tendon strength. So strength training, we need to look at tension training instead and understand that it's really the tendons that need to be able to, you know, they need to be at least equally considered developed. And they are the real foundation of elite athleticism. So if we recap then 5 levels of tenant ability, we want high repetition, short range. So these can be isometric or they can be just slow. But going for long duration initially is what's going to build tolerance, regenerate, bring new life into the area, bring heat into the area, prepare things. If we're doing them at the start of the session. So doing sleds at the start of the session, doing tons of step ups at the start of the session, bring life into the area before you start to insult it. So you're going to insult the area by doing, progressing down this list. So going light to start with on long range exercises. So static stretching is example of extremely light light or of light long range work. And then we can start to add load to that, we can add speed to that and that will challenge the tendons in a slow and controlled way. So this is what we do in knee ability zero. We're working with these shorter range movements initially. So it starts with the step ups and then we progress towards being able to do the split squat, being able to do the squat. So we also go using heavy weights. We can start with heavy weights in the short range movements and then Progress to long. So this is talking then about lower reps, higher load, progressing through from short to long. Eventually, then we want to be able to go fast with heavy loads, right? So drop catch on your bench press, drop catch on your squats. This tendon ability to be able to execute jumps and dunks, how heavy you need to go depends. But things like the Romanian rhythm squats are a nice smooth way to get towards amortization. Being able to transition between the down phase and the up phase, between the eccentric and the concentric. Practicing that ability over and over using the flywheel is a good example as well of being able to go as fast as you can, high force, and it's heavy, but it keeps it slower. So then the highest is the impulse, the five, where it's really like hitting where, you know, maximal, maximal effort and extremely short contact times with heavy loads. So, you know, going for a dunk, going for a depth jump, high jump, these kind of impulse activities is the highest level of tendon ability. That's why often you'll see elite sprinters. They'll go and be able to do Nordic hamstring curls. If you look at cheetah with these hamstring curls, can do phenomenal hamstring, hamstring, you know, human knee flexion, Nordic hamstring curls, whatever we're calling them, he's got phenomenal strength in that exercise. Maybe he developed through that exercise, but probably he mostly developed it by just being crazy fast, right? He ran a world class 200 meters in high school and he's setting the NFL on fire. He's already training that tension. There's no, it's no surprise that he can do those exercises. You can't run at the speeds that those guys can run at without the tension tolerance that they have. And so we just need to progressively train tension tolerance. We can train that through range, through heavy loading and through speed. And we need to develop all three. So this guy's been jumping over and over and over again. Got knees way over, toes extremely elastic. Our little man here on the right and Devon, extreme ability to deal with short range force blasting reactive arm wrestling strength. Like it is very explosive as well. So it's isometric, but you got to look at the tension. The pulses in tension are just extremely high. So he's going, I'd say, way over body weight, where he's pulling as hard as he can and the other guy jerks and pulls as hard as he can. Massive, massive, explosive forces being generated. And it's not just their arms. They leverage in their whole bodies, they're throwing their body weight around. So it's really phenomenal strength. You'll see some of those guys are able to do multiple reps of lock offs on one arm, chin ups and things like this at heavy body weights. Like they're phenomenal strength. It's because they have the tendon ability to go with the maximum strength. Same thing with Louis Simmons and Westside Bible System. Extreme tendon ability coupled with the strength training creates those extreme results. So these are the tendon secrets. I think there's still a lot more for us to discover and more for us to learn and to implement and to systemize and to know exactly what to do when, for who. But these foundations in this way of understanding tendons has progressed for me a lot over the last couple of years and it's allowed me to train with a lot more training volume with less niggles and injuries. And I now have confidence that I can do something stupid and cause a tendon irritation and know that I'm going to be able to overcome that. So I don't have the same fear of strength training as I have had in the past. So I do think that we can really facilitate a new level of athletic performance by understanding how to systematically improve tendon function. That's the goal from today. So I'd love to hear your thoughts. Biggest take homes. I know that most people are experiencing or have experienced some serious tendon issues, dysfunction. It's not fun. We want to overcome that. I want you to have confidence that you can overcome that, that there are proactive things to do, that it's not about rest, that it's not about taking medications, that it's not about just hoping that things are going to get better. We have to be proactive, systematic, and the body will respond to the right stimulus. We just need to understand what that stimulus is and be able to deliver it effectively. And there are now over 2000 case studies with ATG Online showing that this system really works. I believe that the way that ATG deals with tendons is a huge part of why, why, why, why those case studies are coming about. Okay, so yes, we do need long periods of rest. Tendons are slow to adapt. Okay. So it takes months for the tenants to catch up with training. If you go very hard. If you, again, if you look at Devon in, in that example with the arm wrestling, after arm wrestling for the next week or two, he can't go really hard, but he does continue to train. A lot of arm wrestlers would talk about having one or two weeks off after their arm wrestling competitions because there's, there's so much damage done. So we can't do this extreme high loading of the tendons often in west side Bible system, the amortization dominant movements, the extreme fast transitions between down and up. It's, it's once a week, right? And the heavy stuff, the very heavy stuff is once a week maybe because they're different qualities. They can, you know, you can have two insulting sessions per week. Now there's a lot more training than that. They'll go up to 12 sessions a week. But all the other stuff is muscle dominant rather than being tendon dominant. Okay, so it's only the extremely heavy stuff or the amortization, the explosive, you know, the banded work which load the tendons much harder. That is the work that is going to take longer to recover from. So I hope you found this helpful and I'd love to hear your thoughts.