Supplements for tendon health/strength

careful with chondrotin.. I was taking it for awhile for a knee injury and it raised my cholesterol 60 points.

Sisyphus wrote:Gummi Bears....lots and lots of gummi bears!

YES!!!

And dark chocolate and red wine has great healing properties!!!

Mike McKinnon wrote: Ice has worked miracles for my tendonitis as well as recovery time. It both reduces inflamation and promote blood flow to tissue that normally sees little blood flow and therefore heals slowly.

Ice does not promote blood flow; rather the opposite.

Icing for an injury is not the same as what slim was asking. Icing an injury has plenty of supporting evidence for efficacy. Icing after a workout "just because" has no real evidence to my knowledge.

Dana wrote:There really should be two separate health care systems.

One of them being clearly the anonymous anecdotal spray intervention of mountainproject?

Eric Coffman wrote:Tendon strength is improved over time not quickly.

Not necessarily. Some tendons adapt and remodel as quickly as muscle tissue.

And Nate Reno's use of the words "hangboard" and "physical therapy" referencing each other in the same sentence was a new one to me! Usually I think of hangboarding potentially contributing toward a need for physical therapy...haaa

Aerili wrote: Ice does not promote blood flow; rather the opposite. Icing for an injury is not the same as what slim was asking. Icing an injury has plenty of supporting evidence for efficacy. Icing after a workout "just because" has no real evidence to my knowledge. One of them being clearly the anonymous anecdotal spray intervention of mountainproject? Not necessarily. Some tendons adapt and remodel as quickly as muscle tissue. And Nate Reno's use of the words "hangboard" and "physical therapy" referencing each other in the same sentence was a new one to me! Usually I think of hangboarding potentially contributing toward a need for physical therapy...haaa

You must be a PT?

My PT for my shoulder injury cringed when I asked when I could do pull-ups again lol..

Aerili wrote:And Nate Reno's use of the words "hangboard" and "physical therapy" referencing each other in the same sentence was a new one to me! Usually I think of hangboarding potentially contributing toward a need for physical therapy...haaa

That's exactly what I've heard from a lot of people posting as well, with Mark Anderson being a glaring exception that comes to mind (if I recall correctly), and he seems to know what he's doing with hangboards.

I started out pretty easy, and was careful to only slowly add small amounts of weight, even if the prior workout felt easy. Granted I didn't have anything major wrong, only minor pain, but it seemed to work just like physical therapy would. Adding just enough stimulus to produce growth/healing, but not enough to cause any injury.

Oh, I've also found working with theraputty helpful as well.
I guess my point is I've found physical therapy type exercises to be more beneficial than supplements, though both in combination could possibly be the best/quickest route.

Re: icing...

If you are a a wonky science type and enjoy reading this kind of stuff, see if you can get a hold of "Cryotherapy in Sports Injury Management" by Kenneth L. Knight.

There is a section in there that does a pretty thorough takedown of the cold-induced vasodilation theory of healing (which some here may be familiar with from MacCleod's articles on icewater treatment for pulley injuries where he references the Lewis reaction).

The short version is that they found no cumulative increase in bloodflow, and that the mechanism attributed to the efficacy of cryokinetics was that the icing decreased pain which allowed earlier/more exercising and the resulting exercising was what actually increased blood flow and sped healing.

Aerili which tendons are the ones that remodel and adapt as quickly as muscle?

Eric Coffman wrote:Aerili which tendons are the ones that remodel and adapt as quickly as muscle?

There was a thread on UKclimbing in the last couple of years where somebody did a search and could not find any halfway reliable medical studies which supported the old climber's lore that tendons grow slower.
And someone supplied to a link to a recent study which found that tendons generally grow as fast as voluntary muscle.

Hopefully someone here knows the literature (since I surely do not).

It would seem odd to me that a system with widely different rates of growth for tendon and muscle would have competed successfully in the genetic survival+reproduction game that's been going on for millions of years.

Alternate explanations of the old climbers lore ...

? muscles give better warning signals of abuse, so climbers are more likely to foolishly abuse their tendons ?

? tendons are more likely to fail in catastophic mode than muscles, and so the cases of tendon failure are more memorable ?

Ken

It may also have to do with location. I've read that meniscus tears on the outside edge are more likely to heal on their own, than ones on the inside that receive less bloodflow.

I doubt our caveman ancestors were out crushing 5.hard cliffs in their spare time to test finger pulley growth/recovery rates, or repeatedly lifting heavy rocks to stimulate maximal muscle growth and see if the connective tissues could keep up, so in an evolutionary sense, it may not have mattered much at all.

I've been told by my chriopractor that horsetail grass (Equisetum arvense) is a good herbal supplement for tendons. A naturopath once recommended the The Great Mender. I took the Great Mender when I had a pulley injury and it seemed to help.

Hi Sash!

I read "the great mender" and immediately thought of Mr. Arnold. then i saw who was posting, so i'm pretty sure we had the same recommendation. HA!

easy on those tendons out there everyone.

Mike McKinnon wrote: It does promote blood flow in that it vacates blood from the area and then when the area warms blood comes back into the area. Is that not the definition of blood flow?

"Promote" indicates that it would achieve total levels of flow above the baseline (i.e. if you did nothing). And it doesn't. Vessels contract from the cold thereby delivering less flow, then dilate when warmed (or via Lewis "hunting" reaction if still cold), yet the NET amount of blood flow over that period of time is not increased from the baseline level.

Again, see "Cryotherapy in Sports Injury Management" for the relevant studies.

Adrian Hogel wrote:I've been told by my chriopractor that horsetail grass (Equisetum arvense) is a good herbal supplement for tendons. A naturopath once recommended the The Great Mender. I took the Great Mender when I had a pulley injury and it seemed to help. Hi Sash!

Did you ask him how he knows?

What stuff is best? Probably all the good stuff that the officials are accusing Lance Armstrong of taking all those years.

i don't know about Supplements, but if my tendons aren't feeling their best i get a golf ball and roll out my forearms. i heard some where that some tendon discomfort is because your forearms muscles are inflamed after a workout and put pressure on the tendons, i have no idea if this is true but it sure as hell makes me feel lodes better.

Crypply wrote:i don't know about Supplements, but if my tendons aren't feeling their best i get a golf ball and roll out my forearms.

You should upgrade to the ArmAid to really work those knots out.

Eric Coffman wrote:Aerili which tendons are the ones that remodel and adapt as quickly as muscle?

I believe Achilles is most often studied but I am pretty sure I have read some literature about finger tendons as well; the thing is that tendons are not uniform in their properties, their shapes, or their responses to load (or direction of applied forces--i.e. some tendons withstand shearing/compression/tension forces better than others, etc.), so these blanket statements climbers make are just misinformed.

Many assumptions were made about tendons before they could be studied intact in the human body. It was only in the last 10-15 years that new ultrasonography methods have allowed researchers to study tendon mechanics and remodeling behavior in the body. They now see that tendons are far more metabolically active than they previously thought. This means that some studies have observed that certain tendons appear to remodel and adapt as quickly as muscle. In that regard, tendon research (and our understanding of them) is actually quite "new" and far from complete.

One of the more up-to-date books which has some of this info is "Human Tendons: Anatomy, Physiology, and Pathology."

Alternate explanations of the old climbers lore ...

? muscles give better warning signals of abuse, so climbers are more likely to foolishly abuse their tendons ?

? tendons are more likely to fail in catastophic mode than muscles, and so the cases of tendon failure are more memorable ?

^^Oh, the quote function isn't working. :(
Tendon mechanics and physiology are highly complex so it does seem funny to me the things climbers come up with. They make a complicated topic so simplistic! :)

Aerili thanks for the information on current thinking as it applies to tendons. I still stand by my previous post because the topic is how to improve tendon health and strength. The #1 goal is to maintain health of the tendon if you are going to improve strength. That being said the proper way to do that is to progressively load the tendon with activities that simulate what your goal is with the tendon at your individual fitness level. For example if you have been climbing for a few months it isnt smart to crank on a V6 dyno to a two finger pocket. This may be a good problem for someone who has been training correctly and is ready for such a move but the likely risk of injury for a beginning climber is to great and will set them back(Risk of injury vs Reward or benefit from the activity). Proper nutrition, rest and recovery are all secondary to the prevention of injury for building any kind of strength no matter the type of tissue (but are important also).

Aerili wrote: ... so these blanket statements climbers make are just misinformed. Many assumptions were made about tendons before they could be studied intact in the human body. It was only in the last 10-15 years that new ultrasonography methods have allowed researchers to study tendon mechanics and remodeling behavior in the body. ...

So this means that i still have hope to climb the worlds hardest lines?. i´m 42 when i was 21 i got to climb .12a level, no i can manage 5.9 =) . woodchuck atc we have no excuse. .14d here we go.

slim wrote:as ...I just try to ice my fingers for about 15 to 20 minutes at night a few times a week. aerili - any idea of whether this is a good thing or not?

There is (or was?) a myth that after a climbing session is bad to wash your hands because in the long term it will give you arthritis. Mainly because hands are hot and water is cold. So you often saw other climbers eating a burger or a snack with a spicy touch of chalk.

But according to comments ice is good, so after a hard climbing session gyms should have bowls of icy water so we could soak our hands in shaolin style?.

https://www.google.com.co/search?q=kung+fu+finger+training&biw=1366&bih=657&noj=1&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj04sX27ZjOAhUGox4KHQoSByEQ_AUICCgB#imgrc=Th1ZC2g2112pfM%3A