Login | April 28, 2025
Tendon health
PETE GLADDEN
Pete’s World
Published: April 28, 2025
If you’re an exercise enthusiast then you likely spend some workout time building up and strengthening your muscles.
But how much thought and effort during those workout sessions goes into building up and strengthening the tendons?
Ahh yes, the tendons, those inconspicuous bands of connective tissue we only seem to pay attention to when they get injured.
Then our workout world suddenly focuses on a stubborn, slow healing tendinous malady - like tennis elbow, patella tendonitis, achilles tendonitis or biceps tendonitis - that’s preventing us from doing all the workout stuff we really enjoy.
Indeed, it’s very unfortunate that those are typically the times when our tendons go from being imperceptible entities to the stars of the show.
All of that brings us to tendon health, which in my opinion is even more critical than muscle health.
And that opinion’s based on the fact that a healthy muscle is only as strong and healthy as its adjoining tendon.
Now truth be told, tendons can actually endure much greater loads and forces than their accompanying muscles, which is just one of several very good reasons why you might want to consider those unappreciated tendons a little bit more when you’re training.
So in talking tendon health, we first need to take a look at how these tendinous tissues differ from muscle tissues, and then we’ll delve into how to keep those tendons strong and healthy.
Okay, muscle, of which there are three types - skeletal, smooth and heart - is composed of muscle cells that have the ability to contract and therefore produce movement.
Conversely, tendons are made up of tough, flexible but inelastic cords of collagen and other connective components that attaches muscle to bone.
Now one of the cool things about tendinous tissue is that it can function much like a spring, storing and releasing large amounts of energy.
And this peculiar function is why we’re able to do so many of the things we rarely even think about, like running, jumping, walking, sitting, etc.
Now when it comes to muscle strength vs. tendon strength, well, we’re really talking about two distinctly different abilities.
Muscle strength is typically associated with lifting power and endurance whereas tendon strength is typically associated with the capacity to withstand tension and stress. Thus, tendons exist as the vehicles which turn the muscularly generated power into movement. So as you can surmise, synergy between muscles and tendons makes all of our movement possible. It’s when imbalances occur that this wonderful synergy is disrupted and can lead to tendon related injuries.
Therefore, to keep this synergy we need to challenge those tendons just like we challenge the muscles.
And research has shown that heavier weights - load - matters more for tendon adaptation than the type of movement used.
So it’s important to challenge your tendons if you want to make them stronger. And this takes some time because tendons require considerably longer adaptation periods compared to muscles…which is due to the fact that tendons take longer to recover from training stresses.
So what exactly is involved with tendon training? Well, here are two quick and easy ways to put some of your workout’s focus on tendon health.
1. Progressive Overload.
This is the same philosophy that’s utilized in muscle training - progressively increasing the intensity of the workouts over time.
This can be accomplished via increases in load or increases in duration - but not both at the same time.
Thus, get in the habit of varying these two parameters such that occasionally you’re either lifting heavier or lifting for more reps - maybe even to failure. I
n this way you’re not only challenging those muscles, but you’re also challenging the tendons.
And with this training variant you’re getting way more bang for the workout buck.
2. Change the type of muscle contraction
Use slow eccentric contractions, negative reps, and isometric static contractions.
Negative reps allow you to increase the amount of the load because muscles and tendons can handle much heavier weights eccentrically.
And with isometric (static) reps you can provide a higher tension time than you could with a conventional concentric rep.
A good example of each would be to do biceps curls with a heavier weight where you focus on lowering the weight very slowly eccentrically, or conversely you hold the weight in a static position for X amount of seconds isometrically.
As you can see, tendon health is something very easy to accommodate with just a few tweaks to the workout session.