Reversal Strength

Reversal strength is the key to high performance. Muscle and tendon work together to reverse loads.

Amortisation: 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. It's where champions are made or lost.

Can you do it with light loads?

Can you do it with really heavy loads?

Which abilities we need to be better at depends on the sport. But that ability to transfer load, to stop it, and to reverse its direction, is natural human ability. That is the ability to sprint at high speed. That is the ability to pull a massive weight overhead, get under it, and stand up.

If we have more time to produce the force, then muscle can play a bigger role. When there's a fraction of a second, such as top speed running with extremely short ground contact times, we need to be very tendon dominant.

In the 100 meters, where the acceleration phase is still a big part of the race and very important, athletes are very muscular. They get lighter as we go from 100 meters to 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 have to rely on tendons. They can't rely on muscle.

The more ground contact time there is, the more load tolerant they have to be, and the better dealing with loads people have to be.

When there's a lot of change in direction, even soccer players have to be built thicker than high jumpers or long jumpers or medium-long distance runners, because they want to be able to stop and start quickly. Look at the best physicality in soccer, Adama Traore, Messi, Ronaldo, they're not super skinny, they're not massive bodybuilders, but they have a decent amount of muscle mass in their legs because they need to be able to start and stop. They need to be able to load their own tendons and the muscles are what load the tendons. The more ground contact time we're allowed, the more muscle and the more strength is going to play a role. And while muscle and strength development are highly valued by many athletes, tendon training is still poorly understood by many people.

I heard this from various “leaders” in bodybuilding coaching. This is an idea that's been thrown around quite a lot.

"Maybe I can't handle the amount of volume that's required." This is a limiting belief.

I don't believe that's true. I just think we haven't understood how to look after tendons, how to manage tendons and that's what we're going to go through so that we can overcome this limiting belief number one.

You often hear this kind of ideas, people say it about cartilage and things as well.

They've just worn it out.

No, these were biologically adaptive organisms, if we're given the right stimulus, the body will repair itself, and it will regrow.

Ben Patrick is a great example of this, knees over toes guy, six surgeries on his knees, now jumping, dunking, and training day in and 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”, unable to get anything done. To be able to even get on the court to play college basketball was a huge challenge for him. He missed out on so much opportunity because he couldn't repair his tendons.

Now, his ability shows that we can adapt, we can return, it's not about mileage, it's about getting the progression right.

If we can force adaptation or encourage adaptation in the right direction, then we can get to where we want to go to.

As long as you get enough energy, some people claim, you'll be fine.

Every structural engineer is concerned with the quality of the materials. It matters biologically, the quality of materials that are being used. When we're looking at tendons and connective tissue quality, or if we're looking at the bone quality or muscle quality, we must care what fuel we put into our bodies. It matters what those things are made out of.

Try making an amazing 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. Live on soy, oil, and high fructose corn syrup and see what happens.

If that's all you need, hit your macros, then do that and see what happens.

If you take the thing to the extreme, then you start to get closer to the truth. If you go to that extreme of a very bad diet and you see what happens at that point, then the opposite might also be true.

If you ate exactly what the body needs, if you got it perfectly right, would you increase the integrity of the tissues? Of course, you would!

Our ancestors all knew this as well and other animals instinctively eat for their health and for their bodies to repair themselves.

This is kind of the same concept. Just eating a lot of food doesn't mean you're getting what your tendons need. The tendons need glycine and 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 definitely made from - tendons. We need to put those things in the blood if they're going to make their way into the right tissues.

It matters what we eat and often this isn't part of the common message. It is becoming more well-known and it's good that researchers are finally agreeing with what Weston A. Price and nutritional experts have been saying for decades from a traditional health understanding.

The best of sports science is preaching this over the last couple of years. I’m talking about collagen & gelatin, and glycine & proline.

They can also be a negative. Generally, if rest doesn't work straight away, then tendons get stale and they need that freshness that comes from fresh blood in the area.

So rest, if it doesn't work initially, will probably not 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.

For sure, relative rest is important. We're going to go through how to give relative rest without complete rest. The tendon doesn't become stale and stagnate when damaged cells that are being cleared.

We now know that excessive ice is not really part of the solution. Slows down the healing process, and stops the natural healing and inflammation that should be coming to an area when there's been damage.

Strength training and squat/bench/deadlift are not the solutions for tendons. 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, if you're doing the wrong stuff if you do less of it, then that will, to some degree, help, but let's just actually do the right stuff. Let's understand what's going on and let's improve it.

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 tendon solutions here.

This is another kind of limiting belief.

People think, as long as you're getting strong, everything's going to be okay. They'll say "Just do the heavy strength work" when in reality it's the fast stuff and amortization, the ability to reverse loads that will prepare the tendon for high loading and also facilitate elite performance.