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Hello YouTube. On the last video I made about injuries, I asked you guys a question. I had made a segment about the psychology of pain, and in it, I mentioned tendonitis, and I was wondering if it would be something that you would be
Comprehensive guide on understanding, preventing, and rehabbing tendonitis for lifters, emphasizing movement, stress, and recovery.
Key Takeaways
- Tendonitis requires active rehab involving controlled movement, not complete rest.
- Stress management and quality recovery are critical to effective tendonitis healing.
- Pain is an important signal to guide rehab and prevent further tendon damage.
- Ignoring tendonitis or masking pain can worsen the injury and prolong recovery.
- Proper tendon rehab can lead to a pain-free state and prevent future injuries.
Summary
- Tendonitis is a common overuse injury characterized by inflammation of the tendon, affecting many athletes and lifters.
- The video explains the spectrum of tendonitis severity, from mild pain to acute rupture with extreme pain.
- Stopping movement entirely is not recommended as tendons require proper use to heal and avoid worsening the condition.
- External factors like stress and poor recovery can aggravate tendonitis due to the tendons' connection to the central nervous system.
- Muscles can repair themselves quickly, but tendons have limited recuperation ability, making injury prevention crucial.
- Pain from tendonitis is a protective mechanism signaling the body to stop damaging the tendon.
- Proper rehab involves balancing movement to stimulate healing without causing further damage.
- Using painkillers or ignoring pain can hinder tendon adaptation and prolong recovery.
- The video stresses the importance of managing the environment around the injury, including stress and rest quality.
- With correct rehab strategies, it is possible to fully recover and avoid chronic tendonitis.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and viewer interest in tendonitis
- 01:57Severity and impact of tendonitis on lifters
- 03:59Role of stress and recovery in tendonitis
- 05:42Muscle vs tendon recovery differences
- 07:12Pain as a protective mechanism
- 08:42Why stopping training is not the solution
- 10:04Consequences of ignoring tendonitis pain
- 11:55Proper rehab: balancing movement and pain
- 20:25Long-term outlook and prevention strategies
- 25:34Summary and final advice on tendon health
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
interested in learning more about, and a lot of you were actually 100% in agreement with that idea. So this is it.
Speaker A
This is the anti-tendonitis guide. Everything you need to know to make sure that you are never bothered by that type of injury ever again. And I perfectly understand also why so many of you were interested and why so many of
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you deal with tendonitis, and that's because this is the most common type of injury. What some people call an overuse injury. I myself have dealt with tendonitis in the past. So, I have a lengthy experience with that problem, and
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it stuck with me for years and years until I finally managed to figure it out. So, today I'm going to pass down all of my knowledge to you so that you can get rid of that problem hopefully forever.
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So, since it represents most injuries, it's interesting to discuss what tendonitis is. Tendonitis is essentially the inflammation of a tendon, as the name indicates, and it's something that doesn't only affect lifters. Pretty much anyone who does a sport or another is
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going to have to deal with some level of tendonitis because tendonitis is on a spectrum. You can have very mild tendonitis, or you can have acute tendonitis. And the symptoms can really vary because mild tendonitis can just
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be a little bit of a pain in a tendon once in a while. Acute tendonitis can go as far as to create a rupture in the tendon. And the amount of pain you will be in is going to be extreme, even when
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you're not actually using the tendon. So, it's a problem that needs to be taken seriously because if we were to put up a graph of the amount of time that lifters miss gym time, we would see that the vast majority of it that is not
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concerned with life events like your job, your family, etc., would be tendonitis. Most people take time off because of that problem. But you will see that this might not actually be the best idea to start with.
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So, the inflammation of tendonitis, what causes it? Well, it's mainly caused by movement or a lack thereof because there is a nuance. Too many people think that they moved and therefore they got tendonitis. That is a good assessment of
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the situation but not a good way to then reverse engineer the problem because the obvious solution would be to just stop moving, and that is the worst thing you can do because if you can get tendonitis by a movement, you can
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aggravate the tendonitis if you refuse to move afterwards. And this also shows that tendonitis is mostly due again to physical factors and not necessarily to passive factors such as the environment. There is a lot of talk about inflammation in regards to
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diet. That type of inflammation concerns the organs and soft tissues more, and it's more of a global perspective on the signs of inflammatory damage rather than something localized like tendonitis. So even though technically you can modify the amount of inflammation on your
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tendons via modifications in your diet, it's not going to be major. So I won't talk about it today. But keep in mind that even though I'm going to focus on the movement aspect of the thing, you have to take into account recovery
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because you can give yourself tendonitis if you're too stressed out, if you don't sleep enough, or if your quality of rest is not properly managed via your program. These are easy to take care of.
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You just have to be better about it. But I mostly want to insist on the stress thing because your tendons are connected to your central nervous system, and I firmly believe that external factors such as stress can aggravate a
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pre-existing tendonitis, making it so that the methods I'm going to share today are not going to be as effective.
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So before you even attempt to rehab your tendonitis, rehab the environment around it first. Okay? The movement comes later, but the movement is going to be the most important.
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Because your tendons got inflamed via your training. They got inflamed because you trained your muscle. When you train the muscle, what do you do? You recruit the tendons because the tendons are essentially strings that pull on the muscle. I'm not going to expand too much
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on the biomechanics of it all because it's not super important to understand, but just understand that muscles and tendons work hand in hand and that you developed tendonitis because you are working a certain muscle, meaning that you also could have been working the
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muscle in a fashion that put too much stress on the tendon. Something we'll discuss afterwards, but there is a possibility of that because when you lift, the damage is spread out throughout the body. So, the structure handles the damage. Optimally, as
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bodybuilders, we want the muscles to take the brunt of the damage, but you cannot stop the tendons from also experiencing some wear and tear. That is perfectly fine. But it needs to be reduced for one simple reason. Muscles
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exist to recover. The reason why you have a bicep is yes, to be able to do this. But the bicep in itself, in its creation, is engineered to be able to rebuild itself.
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It's the reason why it was created in the first place. There is a built-in mechanism within the bicep and any muscle that predicts destruction and therefore is extremely apt at reconstruction that doesn't exist in the tendon. So nature, the way we're all
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built, intended the tendons to be extremely resistant but also to have very poor recuperation because they're never really supposed to get hurt. And if you do things properly, they never do. But sometimes you do certain movements and they start to hurt. Why do
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they hurt? Why do you think tendonitis is such a [ __ ]? For one simple reason.
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Your body is a [ __ ]. And your body knows that your tendons are vital. So anything that happens to the tendon is going to trigger pain. When you destroy your muscle fibers, you feel soreness, but that's not pain. You know why?
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Because the body knows that it's no big deal. It's just telling you, okay, here is soreness, just so that you know that the muscle is a little bit fatigued. So you give it time, but you don't feel any
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pain, right? It's not really pain when your legs are sore. You interpret that as pain, but it's not. Tendonitis is pain because the body is like, okay, this doesn't prepare itself. I don't know what you're doing to this part of the
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body, but I don't have the ability to make it grow thicker and bigger as fast as the muscles. So stop. Here is some pain. So that you stop.
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Of course, that is the inflammation talking. The tendon is going to take up more space. It's going to rub against cartilage and bone, and it's going to be very uncomfortable. This is something we have all experienced, and that's annoying
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because when you try to train the muscle afterwards, the tendon becomes the limiting factor, and it's something you never want.
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And the solution to that, as I said, would be to just stop working the muscles.
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Right? Working the muscles is what caused the tendonitis. So by definition, if I just stop working the muscle, then it's going to go away. Wrong. The only thing you're going to do is you're going to atrophy the muscle, the muscle which
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in a sense helps the tendon because it also carries its load, and then you're going to just go right back and get even worse tendonitis because you have just let the entire situation go worse.
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Tendons, as I said, don't have the ability to repair, at least not as fast as muscles. And some damage to tendons can be permanent because they just cannot mend themselves. And that's mostly due to their nature, as I said,
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but also to their area and the way they're integrated within the human body. They're placed in locations where they're usually integrated with bones or within bone structures, unlike muscles that tend to be on top of bones, meaning also that there's almost no blood flow
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to tendons. And that's
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the pump. Yeah, the pump is great for the muscle, but you know what it's great for, too? Tendons. And actually, if we were to put the two on a scale, a pump for your tendons is more important than
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a pump for your biceps. So, it's something to keep in mind because if you stop training, that's not going to happen. And the tendon needs to be used.
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So, if you have tendonitis, it's not the end of the world. The tendon is not destroyed. You need to understand that.
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It's just inflamed. And sometimes it might just be because the body decided to inflame it because it sensed a threat. It doesn't mean that it's going to be permanently damaged beyond repair if you move again. The tendon was made
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to move. So when you refuse to do that and you take away that function, guess what happens? It just goes away. The function dies, it is lust. And it's what I personally call the fossilization of tendons and of bodies in general. It's
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when people get hurt and they then they become immobile and they think, okay, if I just cast myself and don't move for two weeks, I'll be fine. No, you'll be much worse off at the end of the two
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weeks. So you need to keep moving, but not in any dangerous fashions. I'm going to describe the way to go about it.
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What I prescribe for people with tendonitis from from non-svere to mild to acute is that it's okay to take a few days off if it's really bad just to let the pain subside because we don't want you to develop a debilitating
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relationship with pain. It's something I described in the video about the psychology of pain in the description.
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The worst thing you can do is get tenonitis, walk on it, cringe every time you do a movement because then it's going to bind into your brain and you're going to associate the movement with pain and that is a problem because it's
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going to mean that the tendonitis is going to stick around. So give yourself a few days to just reenter and then approach the tendonitis with the right mindset since again your tendon is going to heal through movement. No tendinitis on earth
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has ever rested has ever recovered through rest. It's always through movement. If you are able to recover from tenitis by resting, most likely it's just because it was the fluke tendonitis and you got lucky. But most of the time, and you know it, you get
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rid of the tendonitis. You wait for a few weeks or whatever and you think you're being a good boy. Then you come back and at some point the tendonitis rear rears its ugly head. Why? because you never actually cured it. You just
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push it away for a spell. Today, we're going to cure it. And since the role of tendons is to allow movement, if you rest it, as I said, it's not going to actually go the way you think it's going
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to go. The worst pay the worst thing and something that I already mentioned is that pain will come back because what caused it didn't change. So here it's a discussion about effects and symptoms.
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Too many people think of tendonitaris as a punishment and they feel the pain, they see the inflammation and they think, "Oh, poor me." Well, no, not poor you, poor tendon. Your tendon is forced to inflame itself because of something
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you're doing. You're not the victim in this. Your body is the victim. You need to take better care of your body. The problem is that if you think that the issue was pain to start with, you're going to have a tendency to take a break
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for your own selfish self that the pain subsides, but you don't have the best interest of your tendon in mind. You think you do, but you don't. You're being again selfcentered. And by doing that, you're only going to cause more
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damage in the long run because you take a break because you don't like pain. You take three maybe three, four weeks off, which is way too long. Then you come back, your tendon is now weakened. It was completely removed from any blood
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flow for a long time. The muscle is atrophied. And then you train again. What do you think is going to happen?
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Well, the tendon is going to struggle like never before. And you might just enter the constant purgatory of tendonitis. I've already described since you forgot the most important thought part, the most important part. I don't know what was that but um what needed to
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change didn't change what needed to change was what you did to cause the inflammation not the inflammation in itself the inflammation is a result of your action you never changed your action you went right back to your action so you experience these same
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consequences again that is normal what I just described is something that doctors don't understand most likely if you had tendonitis and you went to see your doctor they told you to just take a break. The reason why is because most
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doctors, what we call it doctor generalist, generalist doctors who have a generalist background in medicine, know absolutely nothing about the human body in terms of physical activity. So they give the worst possible advice when it comes to that. And for them, they
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think that their job is to treat pain. And it's something that you see across the board with the amount of painkiller prescriptions that you see in modern medicine where they don't really try to actually cure the problem. They want to
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just push the symptoms away so that you think you're good. You're not good, right? They just sweep the symptoms under the rug, but the the dust is still under the rug. You're going to have to sweep it at some point. I'm here to
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teach you how to sweep it. Don't listen to the doctors. They are simply wrong.
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Rest time is the worst thing you can do for tendonitis. I also encourage you to not take any anti-inflammatory medication because in the same token, you're just getting rid of the symptom.
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You can swallow as many pills as you want and reduce the inflammation, you're going to go back to doing the movement that inflamed you in the first place.
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So, the tendonitaris is going to come back unless you take anti-inflammatory for the rest of your life. But I want to remind you that anti-inflammatory medication weakens tendons and has a tendency to to cause tendon tears. Why?
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Because inflammation is a natural reaction within the tendon. When you train, after your training, your tendons are inflamed just like your muscles are damaged. But if you do it at a low enough level, there's no pain involved because the tendon is supposed to
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inflame. As I said, tendonitis is a spectrum. We all have tendinitis. But for the majority of us that have no pain, we have non-existent tenonitis. So it's just a mild inflammation that goes away in a day. People who have uh non-
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severe tenitis, it lasts a day, etc., etc. into severe. So it's the degree of inflammation that you cause your tendon that creates the tendonitis. Okay? The movement did it in the first place. So if you take away the inflammatory
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response of the tendon, the only thing you do is you're taking away its ability to actually adapt and reinforce itself and you're taking away its ability to talk to you. When you take these pills, you're essentially putting your hand on
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your tendon's mouth and saying, "No, no, I don't care what messages or signals you have to share with me. I don't want to hear it." Well, you're sort of an [ __ ] because the tendon was just trying to help you out. It was sending
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you pain to tell you, "Hey, there's something wrong here. we need to fix it or something bad is going to happen. So stay away from any and every drug because the issue as I said isn't the pain. You want to feel the pain because
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within the rehab you're going to use the pain to assess the damage to the tendon because the least pain you feel the least inflammation and the better you're doing because you know you're moving in the right direction. If you feel more
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pain you know that you're putting too much stress on the tendon and so you're not rehabbing properly. If you take painkillers or anti-inflammatory, those signals are not there anymore. So, you might be doing uh unrepable damage to your tendons and not even know it. I
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used to know a guy, a powerlifter, who had hip tendinitis and he didn't want to give up squatting. So, what he would do is he would take painkillers and squat and he was very happy because there was no pain. Well, guess what happened to
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him? One day he squatted, fell down because he had ruptured his labum. His hip just shattered. Why? because the hip was like, "Okay, the inflammation is getting really bad. Something bad's going to happen." But he felt nothing because he was high on painkillers all
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the time. And one day the hip just shattered and now he's [ __ ] So don't follow his footsteps. Follow my advice.
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You want to feel the pain. It's a good indication of what is going on. It tells you what you're doing wrong because your rehab is going to be based off of that.
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So in terms of practical advice I have for you who suffers from tendinitis getting back into it after the rest that you want to take one or two days tops you want to observe the movements that cause the pain which means you need to
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feel the pain and you want to be able to pinpoint them. You need to be able to say okay this this and this causes pain in this particular area of the body this tendon. After you've done that, you want
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to find ways to work around it. You want to find variations of the movement to find the sweet spot where you can still work the muscle and feel minimal to no tension on the tendon and no pain within
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the movement. That is of course after you warmed up because as I said your tendon is inflamed but you will find and everyone with tendinitis can attest to that that once you're warmed up the pain is lesser. That is because you have sent
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blood into the area and the tendon is getting back into the groove of things.
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But you will also find that if there is a dip in the pain at some point in the training the pain returns. This is when you enter the shadow realm. It's when you enter the point where you're reagravating the tendonitis. You never
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want to go there but you never want to stay there either. You don't want to stay inactive with with midling pain and you never want to get acute pain. You want to be in the valley in between.
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That is the sweet spot. It's the spot when the tenon is warm. You woke it. You you gave it blood, but you never went so far as to damage it again. Because this is the part where there's no pain. And
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if you constantly return here, what happens is slowly but surely the valley is going to increase. It's going to it's going to dig itself more. It's going to expand. And when it expands, it pushes the other ones. So the more you rehab
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your tendon, the faster you're going to be painless when you warm up and the longer you'll be able to work with the without any pain. And the beauty of that is that once this valley is completely set, the tenitis is gone because now
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both extremes are completely they are shoved to the side. They don't exist anymore. So you can spend the entire training with no pain. That is called perfect rehabilitation. And that is possible 100% of the time as long as you
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apply what I just told you to do. So you have found the movement that hurts, you found alternatives and you stay away from the movements and you are going to increase that value as much as you can.
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An advice I have for you guys looking for variations is to think about it in terms of angles. Tendonis is a game of angles because your joint functions like that too. If a movement like this hurts, try like this. Okay, maybe try like
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this. Maybe try like this. Okay, the extension of the arm can be done with multiple angles and with each angle the tendon works in a different fashion. So maybe French press is going to smoke your elbows and really hurt and then
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you'll find out that tricep extensions with a bar is going to be painless. that works as long as you're not too far into that spe side of the spectrum because if the valley can expand, it can regress. So if the valley is very tiny
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and you have tendonitis all the time, well, this also means that the amount of exercises that you're going to suffer from is going to be heightened. And for some people, it's all exercises. That's why tendonitis is really bad. Like if
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any amount of elbow flexion or extension gives you elbow pain, you have severe tendinitis. because now it's not about angles. The tendon is really, really fatigued. Sorry to say that to you, but you did that to yourself. You most
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likely worked on your tenonitis and you didn't apply proper logic and now you have to spend more time rehabbing it. So this means that your value of painless movement is tiny and the the amount of time it's going to take to expand it is
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going to be very long. But it's what you did to yourself. So if you want to be able to be painless again, you're going to have to go through it.
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So as you send blood into the muscle without pain, you also must try to reintroduce the faulty movement without any load because you want to regain the function. I've already described that.
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And if at that point you find out that the movement is just painful always, I suggest you banish it because it just might be a bad movement. And you would be surprised about the amount of people who do movements that hurt them, but
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they continue doing because they think it's mandatory. For any movement you site me, I can find you 15 variations that work just as well. You don't need to continuously carry that cross. Just dump that movement and move on. You're
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going to damage your tendon beyond repair. You're going to end up with global tenonitis. And as someone who had tenditis is in both knees, acute tendonitis in the left knee, in both elbows, I can tell you that it's not fun
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what when every movement you do results in pain. I want to make sure that it never happens to you. But there is hope because nowadays I'm 100% painless all of the time because the my valley is gigantic because I rehabed properly. So
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this is the way you're going to go about it. And if you want to hear more in-depth uh explanations as to this method, check the description. I made a full guide on patellot tendonitis. And even though you don't even if you don't
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have that type of tendonitis, it can be very helpful for you. So as you have done that, you have also started to rebuild your relationship with pain and you also start to understand where you must end the workout. You must end
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the workout right before the pain starts becoming acute because and that's sort of the entire end message of the video. The real problem with tenitis is not the pain, it's what the pain is telling you. The pain is telling you that something is
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going to rupture and that is because in a sense your tendon is like a thread and you're just moving the thread back and forth. If it starts to fume, that means the thread is going to snap. And this is
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something that a lot of people don't realize. But when you watch these compilations of people tearing a bicep, these people had acute tendonitis in bicep tendons for month and month. They just ignored it. Of course, they don't tell you that because they don't want
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you to think that they're idiots, but they are idiots. Because for real naturals who are not on drugs, you will never have a tendon snap as long as you don't just ego lift like an idiot. If you just lift regular conservative loads
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that you know you can handle and you don't have tendonitis, guess what? This means the tendon is healthy, the muscle is working properly, you will never have a freak accident. I can guarantee you that. I lift super heavy for bicep
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movements. I never had even the smidgen of tendonitis in my bicep tendons and I've never had an injury because it makes sense. That's how the body works.
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You think your body just wants you to just fold in half and snap your tendons?
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Your tendons are vital to your body. It's what your body cares about the most after the organs. So any single time the body senses any threat to the tendon, you will know immediately. So there's no need to be paranoid about it, just
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approach tenonitis with a cold head and a logical approach. And doing that means that you're going to always train around it. You you cannot fight tendonitis. You cannot you cannot sedate tendonitis. The only thing you can do is you can try to appease it.
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appease it enough that eventually it sort of allows you to go back to your re regular life but you cannot just go at it like a barbarian too many people do that they think oh I have tendis I'll
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just power through it so they they warm up then the pain is gone they think okay great but then they enter the valley of pain making the tendis worse for the next time they train and it's a vicious
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cycle so don't do that okay train around the pain which will allow you eventually to train without any pain.
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So, don't overreact, but don't underreact. Don't overreact in the sense that you're going to either be paranoid and stop training or train too hard, but don't overreact. Don't underreact in the sense that you're going to just let it
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be and think, "Oh, it's just some pain." No, it's going to get worse and worse.
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Or you're going to just keep it at a mid level because you're never going to actually train intensely on it. But then it means that the muscle will never actually make any progress. So, it's not something that you want either.
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And in terms of uh things that are on the side that concern the environment and not the training, uh I can tell you that icing the tendon if it's exposed can help because it reduces the inflammation and send bloods into the
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area. But keep in mind again that this is not how you're going to fix the tendonitis. It can help with the valley by reducing the inflammation over time with a helpful and healthy method that doesn't inh introduce drugs into the
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mix, but it's not going to cure you. However, something that I have found with acute tendonitis is that when you're done with the training, your tendon is going to be very warm. You're going to feel it to the touch. That
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means that there's a lot of blood in the area. That's really good. What you want to do is you want to go home, let the blood subside, and when the muscle the the tendon sorry, is cold, apply a cold
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pack because now you get the best of both worlds. The tendon was inflamed long enough to get a resistance reaction. Then you reduce the inflammation manually and that is going to lead in the long run to as I said a
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faster recovery. The way to do it is you put an ice pack that is not directly ice because you don't want to rush your skin on the tendon for 10 15 minutes. When it's done, you remove it and you don't
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move the tendon. You can tear your tendon if you move. So don't move it.
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Let the blood flow back into the tendon. Then do slow movements after 10 minutes and then you can move. That's especially true with your knees.
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But the only thing that will truly lead to the end of your tenitis forever is corrective exercises that I just described. Meaning training the muscle and giving the tendon enough stress so that it can adapt and you can eventually
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get rid of any problems. This was the guide to cure your tendinitis. If you have any questions about it, let me know in the comments. Have a good night.
Topics:tendonitistendinopathyinjury rehablifting injuriestendon painoveruse injurystress and recoverymuscle vs tendonpain managementNatural Hypertrophy
