5 Levels of Tendon Ability
If we recap the five levels of tendon ability:
We want higher repetition, short range.
These can be isometric, or they can be just slow.
Going for a long duration initially is what's going to build tolerance, regenerate, and bring new life into the area, bring heat into the area.
Prepare things if we're doing them at the start of the session.
Doing sleds at the start of a session.
Doing tons of step-ups at the start of the session.
Bring life into the area before you start to insult it.
You're going to insult the area by progressing down this list.
Going light to start with on long-range exercises.
Static stretching is an example of extremely light or 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. This is what we do in the Knee Ability Zero.
We're working with these shorter-range movements initially.
It starts with the step-ups and then we progress towards being able to do the split squat.
Using heavy weights. We can start with heavyweights in the short-range movements and then progress to long.
This is talking about lower reps’ higher load progressing through from short to long.
Eventually, we want to be able to go fast with heavy loads.
Drop catch on your bench press.
Drop catch on your squats.
This tendon's ability to be able to execute jumps and dunks, and how heavy you need to go depends.
Things like the Romanian rhythm squats are a nice smooth way to get towards Amortisation.
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.
Then the highest is the impulse, the five where it's really like hitting where your maximal effort and extremely short contact times with heavy loads.
Going for a dunk, going for a depth jump, or high jump, this 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, you can do phenomenal hamstring, 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.
He ran a world-class 200 meters in high school and he's setting the NFL on fire.
He's already training that tension.
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.
We just need to progressively train tension tolerance.
We can train that through range, through heavy loading, and through speed.
We need to develop all three.
This guy's been jumping over and over and over again, got knees way over toes, extremely elastic Allen man here on the right and Devon’s extreme ability to deal with short range, force blasting, reactive arm wrestling strength like it is very explosive.
It's isometric but you've got to look at the tension. The pulses in tension are just extremely high. He's going 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 explosive forces are being generated.
It's not just their arms, they're leveraging their whole bodies.
They're throwing their body weight around.
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 maximal strength.
Same thing with Louis Simmons and Westside Barbell System, extreme tendon ability coupled with strength training creates those extreme results.
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 have progressed for me a lot over the last couple of years.
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.
I don't have the same fear of strength training as I have had in the past.
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.
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.
There are proactive things to do.
It's not about rest.
It's not about taking medications.
It's not about just hoping that things are going to get better.
We have to be proactive, and 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.
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 those case studies are coming about.
Yes, we do need long periods of rest.
Tendons are slow to adapt.
It takes months for the tendons to catch up with training if you go very hard.
If you look at Devon 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 will talk about having one or two weeks off after their arm-wrestling competitions because there's so much damage done.
We can't do this extreme higher loading of the tendons often, in Westside Barbell System, the Amortisation dominant movements, the extreme fast transitions between down and up, it's once a week.
The heavy stuff, the very heavy stuff is once a week.
Maybe because they're different qualities.
You can have two insulting sessions per week.
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 tendon dominant.
It's only the extremely heavy stuff or the Amortisation, the explosive, the banded work which loads the tendons much harder.
That is the work that is going to take longer to recover from.
I hope you found this helpful, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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