when you lift weights you're not just training your muscles you're also training your bones you're training your brain and you're training your flexibility and you're training your energy in your heart and you're training your tendons and your connective tissue so tendons will always be trained when you lift weights but as with all of those other things it's also a good idea to do specific training for your tendons if you want to get the very most out of your body not only will training your tendons prevent injury but it'll make you more explosive it will increase your maximum strength your ability to make use of all that muscle power that you've built so in other words if you intend on getting stronger you need tend on strength oh dear so tendon strength can often be a limiting factor in physical performance so a war log on this channel for instance I talked about a gene doping technique that could block myostatin my stuff and being a molecule that prevents the building of muscle we encourage us to be broken down it prevents it from getting too big when you block this muscle gets bigger naturally however what I didn't go into in depth there was that the knockout mice that had the myostatin removed were more likely to experience tendon injuries and part of that might be because tendons actually require myostatin myostatin plays a maintenance role in tendons and ligaments however it could also be that the muscles have outpaced the tendon strength thus leading to injury and this is also what we see in a lot of people who use anabolic steroids they grow their muscles too quickly and as a result their form far more likely to experience tendon injury so if you build muscle then you need to make sure you're building the tendons at the same rate and what anabolic steroids or myostatin do is they exacerbate a problem that already exists and that's that we don't have as much blood flow to the tendons and to the ligaments as we do for the muscles and that means that the tendons they take a lot longer to grow stronger to develop more power as compared with the muscle so if you go to the gym and start lifting weights regularly then you'll see structural changes in your muscle within eight days so you should start to see progress pretty quickly but in the tendons you don't start to see any structural change for at least two months so that explains why a lot of people are super eager head to the gym start lifting really heavily they get tendon injuries because their muscles mean that they can start lifting heavier weights but their tendons aren't ready yet and they injure themselves so in order to prevent this we need to make sure that we ease ourselves in to exercise see kids don't have so much for a problem with tendon injuries and that's because they're constantly running the constant jumping climbing playing games however adults we tend to spend a lot of time sitting at a computer not doing very much sitting on a couch so our tendons on getting that regular exercise that regular stimulation and then suddenly we hit the gym and we start lifting big heavy weights is no wonder that you're going to experience some kind of problem so what we need to do before we start lifting heavy weights is to ramp up our physical exercise with lots of high volume lots of light weights just to get the body moving again and to build up the tendon strength to support the heavy weights that are going to be moving around later on so frequency and volume is one of the most important things when you're starting out in order to strengthen your tendons and doing a lot of pump work is good as well because as I said part of the problem here is blood flow heading to that connective tissue the good news is that tendons also are much slower to lose that strength after you finish training so that means that you can switch from a higher volume light lighter weight kind of program to a more intensity based program later on once you've built that stable base of tendon strength and also do pump work that means very high repetition light weights just like the stuff I talked about for vascularity training all of those techniques you know long supersets 20 repetitions etc with light weights right at the beginning will increase blood flow to the tendons and therefore help them to recover more and to respond to the stimulus of giving them by training them if you want to see an example of just what increasing frequency and volume can do for your finger strength then look no further than rock climber a rock climber with 15 plus years of experience who regularly uses their hands to hold their entire weight it's going to see an increase in tendon thickness in the hands and in the wrists and the forearms of 62 to 76 percent so that's huge their tendons are hugely thicker and if you want to see a really visceral example of this they're not no further Alex Honnold professional rock climber who just has these beefy huge fingers I found out that reference for our Marx Daily Apple a great website with lots of useful tips on building tender strength so I'll link to that in the description down below another excellent tool for preventing injury in the tendons is slow eccentrics that simply means holding the weight and then lengthening the muscle as you gradually lower it and studies show that for instance people suffering from achilles tendonitis can restore normal function ality reduced pain by using things like slow eccentrics on heel dips so along with your pump work and your increased volume you also want to be doing these slow eccentric starting with a light weight and if you do all this then over two months you should build up an excellent base of strength so that we can start loading on the weights now that you're confident that your tendons and your ligaments are ready for that increased weight how are we going to maximize the strength and power of our tendons so that we can lift more and so that we have more long-term strength even as we get older and our muscles start to weaken so one thing you can do is find ways to lift heavier then your muscles can lift so your tendons in theory can take more weight than your muscles so if you can put yourself under that load even without having to lift yourself to get there then you can stress the tendons enough to cause massive growth this is something that we see in the studies that you do need to apply stress to the tendons in order to see the most growth remember this is only once we've built up enough resilience in our tendons through a frequent and lightweight training program that we've done for a while so this is more of an advanced technique so things you can do to lift more than you can lift include using hangs obviously using slow- so you cheat your way up or you're getting assists to get your way up and then you just lower await that you can't lift overcoming isometrics which i always talk about or something like partials the YouTuber alpha destiny talks about partials all the time he loves them he does lots of rack pulls over the knee and if you check out his channel well then his results speak for themselves so the idea is what you're doing is instead of doing the full range of motion you're starting the weight much higher up or lower or your finishing before you do the full range of motion and a lot of people will say well full range motion is really good and yes it is in fact we've just seen that stretching the muscle with something like a hill dip can be very good for building tendons but so too if you want that strength can just loading that with lots of weight and if you can't do a deadlift with you know whatever this insane weight is then you might be able to do a rack pull because you're pulling it a much shorter distance and what this is doing is it's still putting those tendons under that huge load still thickening and strengthening them at the same time this is also a great way of busting plateaus because it teaches you to be more confident with a really heavy weight and that makes a huge difference so I've been doing it with bench press for instance I just put the the pins in the rack high up lift the barbell off lower it and then they hit the rack then I just push it back up that way I can put myself under a heavier weight than I could normally manage on my own heavier them all my 1 rep max or my 1 rep max so that I don't risk trapping myself and then I can just put it back and I've experienced that really heavy weight and my tendons have experience that really heavy weight and it builds strength and like I say if you check out his channel you'll see that he's developed a huge amount of strength this way another similar technique you can use is something called accommodating resistance and what this means is that you're using a form of resistance that's going to get heavier as you get to the easier portion of the range of motion so for instance you'd be doing a bench press where it's lighter when it's close to your chest and it's heavier when it's further from your chest so how might you achieve this well one option is to use reverse bands so bands are attached to the top of the rack and then when they're lowered down there's less slack so the bar feels lighter and as you lift them higher up that they then become slack and you're lifting the entire weight another option is to use chain so if you hang chains off the edges of the barbell then when you lower the barbell the chains pile up on the floor and when you raise it again you're lifting more and more of the chain on top of the barbell and once again you can't count this as your one direct max because it is cheating but it's a fantastic way to put your tendons and your connective tissue in your bones under that huge load and at the same time to build that confidence to build the supporting muscles that balance and you it will improve your one rep max when you do the full range of motion and there's nothing to stop you from doing it at all different ranges of motion to hit the weak parts that you're struggling with etc I didn't have chains so what I did was I used a weighted belt for this example I was doing dips and then when I went low enough the weight rested on the floor when I got high enough they picked up along with me there's also a chance that by doing this you're overriding or inhibiting the Golgi tendon organs this is a somewhat see the scientific concept it's a little bit controversial and the Goldi tendon or there's a lot more complicated and void involved in a lot of fine muscle movement then a lot of people give it credit for however we do know that goggly tendon organ may play a role in shutting off strength when it thinks you're lifting too heavy when it thinks that the contraction is too great and you're gonna risk injury so by training yourself to use heavier weights the idea is that you're training the gorgon Golgi tendon organ to shut up so that you can lift heavier without it saying oh dear and shutting off your all of your strengths a lot of people will say that you know when you're lifting a weight so you're doing bench press and then suddenly you lose all your strength it's not like you gradually get smaller get weaker you suddenly drop it and your spot has to step in they say that's the Golgi tendon organ I say whether or not that's true remains to be seen but whatever the mechanism using these partials does seem to be a good way of overriding your psychological barriers building up more strength in the connective tissue and the supporting muscles etc so I highly recommend giving it go actually there's just a lot of value to occasionally putting yourself under or over a really big amount of weight you can feel the body responding to that it's great for grip - yes weighted stretching also is very effective and that makes sense too because really weight is stretching is the natural progression natural evolution of weighted eccentric slow eccentric so that just basically means using an increased range of motion where you start to feel a stretch whilst under some kind of resistance I've done a whole video on that so check that out and studies again show this can build more strength in attendance for instance doing a decline squat has been shown to be more effective at building strength and rehabilitating tendons than the regular squat so this is something to bear in mind and that's the other thing to consider with these rock climbers they're not just rock climbing regularly they're also under a whole lot of weight and we see that they're either in a crimp position or a fulcrum so they're stretching their tendons and they're also holding a lot of weight in a kind of crimped position with no range of motion so we're just mimicking that for the rest of the body so now we know that the tendons play a very important role in building maximal strength and we know how to train for that specifically by using weighted stretching and by using just huge amounts of weight through overcoming isometrics or hangs or partials however our tendons also play a big role in explosive movements and that's because they have a kind of all of our connective tissue has a kind of rebound it's very elastic and this is called hysteresis and the lower your hysteresis the more efficient you'll be be less energy it will require for you to run jump etc because of more of that Energy's being returned for a kind of rebound effect so actually tendons play big much bigger role in the biomechanics of many movements that you might at first think so for instance when we're running when we're sprinting if you look at the activation of the muscles you probably notice there's less activation in the calves than you might think and that's because the Achilles tendon is actually doing a lot of work simply by rebounding by storing and returning the energy so that the calf muscle you're not actually generating so much energy you're just bouncing off of the tarmac and if you look at animals like cheetahs like lepers that run super fast what you'll notice is that they don't have huge calves they have huge tendons and in fact the military are looking into building you know stilts things like the power risers that kind of mimic this tendon in order to give us greater speed so building more strength lowering the hysteresis in the Achilles tendon would help to improve your running speed perhaps and more so than building more calf strength and when you think about it this way it might make more sense not to refer to muscles individually or individual muscle groups but rather empty use which are muscle tendon units they work as a whole so tendon can be stiff meaning that it's thicker and it rebounds it stores more energy but a tendon can also be more flexible or you call that compliant more compliant meaning that it's easier to stretch some tendons you want to be stiffer some tendons you want to be more compliant depending on your biomechanics and once again we start to see ya interference principle come into play here because depending on the types of actions you use whether you're a tennis player whether you're a swimmer whether you're a martial artist you're going to see different balances of stiffness and compliance in different tendons different connective tissue throughout your body and of course it's not just your tendons that play a role in this but other types of connective tissue - so your tendons connect muscle to bone of course your ligaments connect bone to bone they're responsible for your joints and then you have your muscle fascia which is kind of like a shrink wrap that surrounds all your muscle and surrounds your internal organs and muscle fascia also might play a role in this kind of rebound effect by helping you to return that energy from a depth jump for instance and of course the way we train this once again is simply said specific adaptations to impose demands set at million times if you want to train for something you do that thing so in this case you do the movement that you want to become more explosive in an explosive manner I love explosive training I've talked about it a lot I've also talked about how eccentric training can improve your explosiveness likewise so you can heavy weights so if you throw an explosive training to things like clapping press-ups depth jumps you know box jumps burpees that kind of thing then you're gonna see more explosiveness and you're gonna build that kind of rebound that stiffness in the tendons but at the same time in other areas if you want to prevent injury or if you just want to improve your flexibility then train stretching and think about how they're working to support one another but also against one another and finally the last piece of the puzzle is diet and recovery we've seen there's less blood flow to the tendons and the ligaments so of course they need longer to recover and if they injured in any way they need even more time to recover typically you should try and leave 48 hours between workouts targeting specific areas that are very heavy or very explosive and this will give your attendance and your ligaments and your muscle faster time to recover at the same time you want to try and enhance blood flow to those areas if you can especially if they're injured so if you use a cold compress you'll reduce swelling but if you use heat then you can encourage blood flow so one thing you can do is to use contrast therapy that means like a shower where you very hot and very cold in you know one at a time in order to not only reduce swelling but also improve blood flow massage and self myofascial release might also encourage blood flow to those areas you will increase the amount of collagen in your body so consume vitamin C this has been shown to increase that along with calcium and I'll go into this in more detail in future I'm doing a video soon on healing and also recommend you check out my video on recovery watch those and combine it this kind of training and you should start to see your tendons become stronger thicker more resilient to injury more explosive and that will benefit you in every aspect of your performance so thanks a ton for watching guys I hope you found something useful and interesting it was actually one of the most requested videos on this channel along with how to increase your healing which I am getting to so kind of makes you wonder if you guys are all injured you know be careful out there if you found this video useful and interesting then please leave a like please share around comment down below let me know if I missed anything any tips that you have any suggestions for future videos head over to the Facebook page where you can enjoy joining in with the conversation and giving me more suggestions follow me on Instagram want to see my training or Twitter if you wanna hear my random musings head over to the blog there's the fuller version of this in a blog post format so check that out as long as as well as the other articles and subscribe hit the bell button for notifications stay tuned in general cuz I've got lots more like this on the way I'll be talking like I say about healing I'm talking about mi-6 training how to be more like bond or Jason Bourne talking about more infinity war inspired training about real-life super soldiers all this stuff if that sounds good then stay tuned I'll see you next time thanks a ton for watching and bye for now