Tendons Need Load to Stay Strong

Opener

Lifters think a lot about muscle and very little about the tendons that connect it to bone. Tendons are not passive cables. They are living tissue with their own cells, and those cells respond to how you load them. Load them sensibly and they get stiffer and stronger. Overload them, or take load away for too long, and they break down.

A 2013 review in The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery by Marc Galloway, MD, of the Cincinnati Sports Medicine and Orthopaedic Center, with Andrea Lalley and Jason Shearn, PhD, of the University of Cincinnati, pulled together what is known about how mechanical loading shapes tendons through development, everyday maintenance, injury and repair. Its central point is that normal, controlled load is what keeps a tendon healthy, and that both too much and too little load play a part in tendon injury.

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1. What the review is asking

How does mechanical load affect a tendon over its life? The authors look at how tendons form, how they maintain themselves, how they get injured, how they heal on their own, and how rehabilitation uses load to improve repair.