Muscles, Tendons, and Ligaments, Oh My!
Do you know the difference between a tendon and a ligament? What about the way they work with our musculature to produce movement?
The human body is a complex system of interdependent parts. When committing to an exercise regimen, having a basic understanding of the ways these parts work together can go a long way in reaching your goals without the setback of a strain or sprain. This is because some parts of the body get stronger faster than those they are reliant upon to complete the movement patterns we train.
For this blog, we’ll mainly take a look at skeletal muscles and tendons.
Skeletal Muscles: Muscle tissue we have voluntary control over through the somatic nervous system
Tendons: Connect muscle to bone. When we contract skeletal muscle, the force is transferred to its tendon, which pulls the bone, allowing for skeletal motion.
Ligaments: Connect bone to bone
Skeletal muscle responds quickly to training for multiple reasons, one of which is blood flow. Compared to skeletal muscle, tendons have less blood flow, and take longer to gain strength. When you consider this discrepancy, it’s no surprise that tendon pain is one of the more common injuries trainees experience, especially those newer to resistance training (training against a force such as weights or bands).
When we train against resistance with the goal of making our muscles stronger, we purposely “injure” the muscle. During the time between training sessions, our muscle repairs itself (which we’ll talk about in a later blog) to better perform under future force of similar magnitude. The same is true for our tendons. However, as noted above, the collagen-dense tendon tissue does not repair itself at the same rate as its corresponding muscle tissue.
So, without adequate time to rest and repair, the fatigued tendon tissue will go into the next resistance training session comparably less able to handle the same force as the skeletal muscle.
Resistance training occurs, and the cycle continues.
Eventually, the tendon will demand rest by signaling pain. If the pain is ignored, tendonitis may occur, which means that tendon and its corresponding muscle group will need a prolonged break from training.
This is why it’s crucial to have a balanced exercise program that gradually adds force and rotates muscle groups. Managing the rate with which we increase resistance might mean that we temporarily work with lighter force than our skeletal muscle is capable of managing safely. In doing so, we give our tendons the ability to rest and recover, thereby growing stronger through the repair process.
Setting this strong foundation is a must and simply requires you to work smarter, not harder, to see results. Prevent injury to tendons by listening to your body’s signals, rotating muscle groups in your programming, and adding resistance gradually.
If you’re looking for an exercise program that covers all these bases, e-mail Hello@GoodFormStudios.com. We’ll connect you to a trainer that can help take the guesswork out of exercise so that you can strengthen your entire body on a schedule that works for you!
