I want to talk a little bit about how you need to eat if you have a tendon issue. Eating to repair tendons isn’t that difficult, but you do need to focus on a couple of important points. First and foremost, tendons are composed of protein, so you need to make sure that you’re getting enough of that macronutrient in your diet. And two, it’s a really good idea to have a few excess calories each day as well.
Extra calories? But won’t that make me fat?
Yes, extra calories will mean that you’re going to put on a bit of extra weight. But let’s keep the end goal in mind. You have a tendon problem, and if it’s tendonosis (as opposed to tendonitis) the tendon has been damaged. In order to repair it, you’d be well advised to eat a little—a little, mind you—over your normal caloric level. Being in a caloric deficit makes it much harder for the body to allocate resources for repair, because it necessarily means taking energy away from something else that needs to be done. If you’re eating a little extra, though, there’s no problem. Your body can keep everything going along smoothly and make the required repairs at the same time. Basically, there’s enough to go around.
It’s the same story with protein. Protein provides the building blocks for almost everything in your body, and most people honestly don’t get enough in their diet. I give specific recommendations in my book, but basically if you’re trying to heal a tendon you need to eat a lot of the stuff.
Here’s an example of a good meal. (It’s good basic nutrition no matter what the circumstances, but especially if you’re trying to repair your tendons.) A good, tendon-healthy breakfast
Let’s break it down:
First, there is a lot of protein in this meal. One scoop of the powder has 24 grams, and each of the six egg whites (I think I might have eaten a couple before I took the shot) has 3g apiece. That’s a total of 42g…and I’m going to eat another five meals with the same amount through the day. That’s a total of over 200g of protein, and I weigh about 180-185lbs (or 82-84kgs). In other words, more than one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight. I challenge you to keep track of what you eat on a typical day and see if you’re getting that much yourself.
Second, most of the meal is plant-based. I am not a vegan or vegetarian by any means, but there is no question that eating a plant-based diet reduces inflammation in the body. And too much inflammation will only hurt your tendons. So everything except the egg whites is from a plant, including the protein powder.
Third, this breakfast has a lot of carbs for energy. Energy is required for repair. And if you work a normal schedule, carbs are processed best at two points during the day: first thing in the morning and immediately after you exercise. I do eat salads and such with my other meals, because fiber is important, but I limit starches like oatmeal and especially sugary fruits (like the raisons you see) to mornings and within an hour of working out.
So there you have it. An example of a meal that will go a long way toward giving you the building blocks necessary to heal your tendons up quickly. If you want more specific recommendations, along with a program designed to help put your body back in order in the shortest amount of time as possible, you can check out my sales page here.
I’ve written about topical (applied to the skin) capsaicin before, and my take is that creams and so on that contain capsaicin are pretty much worthless for relieving tendon pain.
But there may be some merit to injecting capsaicin into your body in order to provide some temporary relief from pain. In a 2015 study, researchers performed some tendon surgery on rabbits and tested to see whether injecting capsaicin did any long-term damage to the animals. Turns out that 18 weeks after the surgery, the injected group did just as well as the control group in terms of recovery. And the injected group had less pain after their operations.
Of course, it’s only one study. And animal studies don’t always translate into the same results when you try the same treatment on humans. But quite often what works in one mammal will work in another (ie, homo sapiens). ANd hte study was, as far as I can see, pretty well designed.
So if you’re suffering from tendon pain, having a doctor inject you with purified capsaicin might give you some real relief. But of course this is only a temporary fix. Might be good if you have tendonitis (inflammation of the tendon), but long term, it’s not going to help if you have tendonosis (degeneration of the tendon). For that, you’re going to need something like targeted rehab or a program like the one outlined in my book. If you’re not sure which condition you have, feel free to take my quick and easy (and free!) tendon test here.
So there has been a lot of interest lately about taking creatine to help get rid of tendonitis. In this post, I’ll explore what science has to say about the subject.
Or rather, I’d like to explore what science says…but there just isn’t much. I spent about half an hour on PubMed and came up with:
One small study that seems to show some benefit. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5950745/) The study, done on 18 young swimmers, indicated that taking creatine after an overuse tendon injury did have some beneficial effects. Mainly, it helped to lessen muscle loss during both immobilization and rehabilitation. The creatine group also had a faster decrease in pain than the non-creatine group.
It was a little surprising that this was the only study that came up for creatine as it relates to tendon health, because creatine is easily the most studied supplement on earth. Athletes of all kinds have been using it for years, and it’s probably the most widely taken weight training supplement as well. But no one seems to be worried about looking at it for tendon health. Anecdotally, a lot of gym-goers seem to think that it helps with tendon pain. But of course anecdotes aren’t science.
Still, that was it. One study, 18 participants divided into two groups of nine. So while this is a very small study and definitely shouldn’t be taken as gospel, it does seem to indicate that creatine supplementation might help if you have a tendon issue. And since creatine monohydrate is both cheap and widely available, why not try it out if you’re experiencing tendon pain? It can’t hurt, and it might just help.
“I wrote a short article on glucosamine and tendon pain a little while back, but I’ll just post quickly about the subject here again, because I keep seeing this stuff advertised. Basically, there are websites out there that try to sell you glucosamine for tendonitis. It’s supposed to work well for joints, so I guess that they figure it will work for tendons, too.
The problem is, tendons aren’t joints. Joints are made up of cartilage, which glucosamine helps the body to form, but tendons are made up of collagen. Tendons have blood vessels in them, joints don’t. Joints connect bones to other bones; tendons connect bones to muscles. And so on. Physiologically and mechanically, they’re completely different tissues.
But people get collagen and cartilage confused, because they sound sort of the same. They both have three syllables. They both start with a C and have an L or two in the middle, and a G towards the end there. And unscrupulous marketers take advantage of this unconscious confusion to try to sell you one when it has nothing to do with the other. Most often the stuff they’re trying to sell you is in the form of pills, but sometimes it’ll be a spray or ointment that you’re supposed to apply directly to the skin, or occasionally a powder that you mix into liquid. But it doesn’t matter what the delivery method is, these products won’t do the job.
If you have joint pain, then by all means try glucosamine. There is at least some evidence that it may help, and it certainly won’t hurt you. Furthermore, it’s widely available and pretty cheap. But selling the stuff for tendon pain is nothing more than preying on the gullibility and medical ignorance of the general populace. It’s a rip-off, and any website that lists it for tendonitis, tendonosis or any other form of tendonopathy should be avoided.
So in Part 1 of this article, I talked a bit about how to maintain (or even develop) muscle tissue past the age of forty. If you haven’t read that post, you might want to check it out. But this is mainly a tendon blog, and while maintaining muscle mass and strength should definitely be a priority as we get older, so is maintaining tendon health past age forty. So now it’s time to talk about the tendons, and below are some useful tips.
Make use of static holds to develop tendon strength along with more muscle.
Tendons take a lot longer than muscles to adapt. Like 200-210 days or so, even in younger athletes. Who knows what it is in older ones (I haven’t seen any good studies), but it’s a safe bet that the process takes even longer. Contrast this with how long it takes for muscles to really recover; even in older athletes, a serious 1RM maximal attempt will “only” take a month or so to completely recover from. The end result is: you can build muscle strength a lot faster than your tendons can adapt…at any age.
Static holds are one way to get around this problem. With a static hold – meaning that you just take the weight of whatever you’re lifting and hold it in one position (usually, but not always, the start position) of an exercise you can take an additional load onto your tendons without subjecting them to the full range (and stretch) of motion of the exercise. The end result is that the tendons start to adapt but you don’t run nearly as much risk of injury.
Anyone can hold quite a bit more weight than they can actually lift through the full range of motion of an exercise, but don’t use this fact to go wild with this technique. I generally recommend static holds at about 105-110% of one’s 1RM for best tendon strengthening results. Any higher than that and you start running more risk of injury…with no concomitant gain in results.
Also, I wouldn’t do this training more than once a week or so.
Avoid inflammation as much as possible
This means cleaning up your diet, first and foremost. By now, pretty much everyone knows that fruits and vegetables are good for you and will help reduce inflammation. Other than that, whole grains, fatty fish and nuts are good choices. You can also get additional anti-inflammatory effects by drinking green tea (and maybe coffee as well, but the jury’s still out) and a glass or so of red wine per day.
It also means avoiding certain foods, the most common of which are refined carbohydrates. Bread in particular is bad, but so are pastries and stuff like kiddie breakfast cereals. You can throw out other delicious treats like french fries and sodas as well. And limiting red meat (if you like) wouldn’t hurt either.
Inflammation is a precursor to a whole host of diseases, which is a fancy way of saying that if you eat enough of the bad foods above, sooner or later you’re going to pay for it. So as you get older, take a tip from Coach Dan John (one of the most sensible voices in fitness) and just start eating like an adult. Seriously. Just do it.
Finally, supplements like PQQ, curcumin and spirolina are all good choices to help limit inflammation while at the same time not interfering with your immune system too much. (Yes, it can be an issue.) Fish oil and krill oil are also good, but don’t go overboard with either. You can limit fish oil to about 3g/day and not suffer from immune problems (there isn’t a lot of human research on krill oil yet, but krill oil’s effects are more powerful than fish oil’s, so the limit should probably be less, maybe 2g/day), but above that level you start running a risk of compromised T-cells and other issues.
Vary your routine.
Maybe the most common mistake I see people make in the gym is not varying their routine. And older athletes are especially prone to this. They’ll get a routine they like and fall in love with it, make some decent progress for a month…and then use that same routine for the next year and a half. And the only reason they stop using it is because they get injured.
If you’ve been training for any length of time – and if you’re over 40 you’re probably in this category – you should be changing your routine up at least every two months. Failing to do so results in a much higher probability of getting into pattern overload, which is a fancy way of saying that if you stress your body too much or too often in the same way, at the same angle, you’re going to get injured. If you do barbell bench presses all the time and never do dips, or incline press, or dumbbell press, or close-grips, you’re stressing your pecs, shoulders and triceps in exactly the same way over and over and over again. The angle is the same, the groove is the same, and the weight just keeps going up. So you become ripe for injury.
Alternatively, you can rotate between the above exercises and not have to worry too much about one particular line of stress. Note that I said “rotate between”, not “add”. I’m a firm believer in doing just one major exercise (especially if it’s some a variant of a pressing movement) per bodypart as we get older. Of course you can do some accessory work as well, but that should be in a different rep range (ie, not as heavy as your major lift). I definitely am against the frat-boy workout, which, if you don’t know, is five or ten sets of bench press, followed by five sets of incline press, followed by 4-5 sets of decline press, followed by 3-4 sets of dumbbell flyes…usually done three times a week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Save stretching for after you’re done exercising.
Use foam rolling before. And don’t stretch too much between sets. This has nothing to do with tendons; it’s simply a sensible precaution to take because if you stretch too much between sets, especially heavy sets, you increase your risk of tearing a muscle quite a bit. Yes, I know; lots of pro bodybuilders say it’s good for your pump. That’s fine – let the genetic freaks do whatever they like. For the rest of us mortals, stretching between sets is asking for trouble.
Don’t warm up with endless repetitions.
Every rep you perform is one more mile on the body, so to speak, and too many reps are not only unnecessary, they’re actually counter-productive. I personally only do about 3-5 reps on really light sets (anything less than about 60% of my one rep maximum, or 1RM for short, on that exercise), 2-3 reps up to about 85% 1RM, and then only single reps above that point. If you’ve been doing a 1970s olde schoole Arnold Schwarzenegger type warm-up, starting out with 10 or more reps for your light sets and pyramiding up from there, give my way a try and see what you think.
It’s a fact; older athletes have trouble maintaining muscle mass. Somewhere around the start of your fifth decade, a condition called “anabolic resistance” sets in. While no one really knows the exact mechanisms involved, the problem is that it’s harder for the body to absorb the amino acids needed for developing and maintaining muscle after forty or therabouts.
Given that anabolic resistance exists, the logical question is how to combat it. Below I’ll give you some tips that will help get protein into your muscles, and then, since this mainly a tendon blog, in the second part of the article I’ll give you some hints about how to make sure your tendons keep up with the muscles so that you don’t end up with a soft-tissue injury.
Creatine
Pretty much everyone has heard of creatine by now, given that it’s the most studied supplement in history. Creatine is cheap and it just works, especially if you’re vegetarian or vegan. And as long as we’re talking about non-meat diets, veggie proteins are just as effective as animal-based ones. No need to get “complete protein” in each and every meal.
Full disclosure: the “complete protein” argument was something I believed for a long time. But more recent research has proven the idea wrong, and I’m working on a new edition of Target Tendonitis to reflect that.
Leucine
Leucine is an essential amino acid, which means that the body can’t manufacture it out of other aminos. It also, for our purposes, facilitates MPS. It does this by blocking a substance that impedes mTOR (mammalian Target Of Rapamycin), which has the net effect of switching mTOR on. The science behind all of this is way, waaaay beyond this blog post, but suffice to say that mTOR activation is the foundation for increased MPS. So the end result is to build more muscle. While younger men (no data on women, sorry) can get some benefit from supplementing with 2.5g per meal, older trainees do better with up to 4g.
So take 3-4g of leucine with meals to facilitate MPS (muscle protein synthesis). In particular, be sure to get your leucine in around your workout, both pre- and post-.
Eat more protein with each meal
While there is a commonly accepted idea that “you only need about 20g of protein per meal, and anything beyond that gets wasted”, research says differently. This study, for example, found that 40g per meal stimulated more MPS than 20, and the study was done on trained subjects. Admittedly, the subjects were young men, not older ones, but real-world observation in gyms shows that older athletes can benefit as well. How much is “more”? Research seems to indicate around 0.5-0.6g per kilo of bodyweight per day is the lower limit. Personally, I think most older athletes can go as far as to double that without any problem and experience increased MPS.
While lots of people believe that there is a 24-hour window to get protein in after training, the truth is that the necessity of immediate post-workout protein supplementation varies with the training age of the athlete. Basically, if you’ve been training less than a year, you don’t need a PW-drink at all. But older athletes have generally been training for years, if not decades, and for them getting some protein (and some simple carbs) in right after the workout ends is important. Long-term training produces physical changes in the body that go beyond just the size of your biceps, and one of these is apparently how quickly and efficiently protein gets shunted to muscles after physical exertion. So if you’re of an advanced training age, don’t miss your window!
Get a good digestive aid
And if you’re going to up your protein (or even if you’re not), I would also recommend getting a good digestive aid to help get the job done in your stomach. As the saying goes, it’s not what you eat, it’s what you absorb. Digestive aids are cheap and easy to find, and these days a lot of them taste pretty good. Try a few and see if you don’t experience more in the way of absorption and less in the way of gas.
I personally use a garlic-based digestive aid, as it not only helps with digestion but provides a host of other anti-cancer, antibacterial and anti-viral health benefits as well. (Might as well get as much health bang for your pill as possible, right?) But they are admittedly a bit more expensive than some other options, and if all you need is to get the protein digested and into your body, a simple papaya supplement will do the job perfectly well and cost as little as three bucks a month.
Okay, so that’s the skinny on developing and maintaining muscle after forty.
More protein, at least 0.5-0.6g per kilo of bodyweight
a digestive aid to help break it down
3 to 4g of leucine with meals
creatine, and
have a post-workout drink immediately after you finish training.
Try this protocol for a month and see if you don’t experience some new growth. And stay tuned for Part II of this article, when I talk about tendons.
There are a lot of searches going on for the keywords “magnesium and tendon pain”. if you look around the internet, quite a few health oriented websites have advice pertaining to the topic. And some recommend taking magnesium if you are experiencing tendon issues. But is the advice any good? Let’s take a look and see.
Is magnesium really necessary in the first place?
First, let’s hear what the Livestrong, one of the most popular sites on the Internet, has to say:
Magnesium, especially when used in combination with calcium, may be helpful in treating your tendonitis and tendon tissue damage…magnesium and calcium are required for connective tissue repair — tendons are a type of connective tissue — and proper muscular function. These nutrients have long been used as an adjunct therapy in the treatment of tendonitis and bursitis, although more clinical research evidence may be required to validate their use for these health purposes.
The article goes on to note (correctly) that:
Few research studies have evaluated the effects of magnesium in treating tendonitis. Most studies examining the effects of magnesium on tendon problems involve animals who are fed a magnesium-deficient diet before being treated with certain prescription drugs, such as quinolones — antibacterial agents that are known to cause Achilles tendonitis. A study published in the journal “Archives of Toxicology” in August 2001 concludes that those with a magnesium deficiency may be more susceptible to quinolone-induced tendon problems.
So right here, you might want to stop and think about what’s been said. First, there isn’t really any research in humans showing a link between magnesium and tendon pain…much less any that shows magnesium to be helpful in repairing tendons. Second, the animal studies that have been done were all done on subjects that had a clinical deficiency artificially imposed on them. Of course, if you are deficient in magnesium and you develop tendon issues, it might make sense to supplement with extra magnesium (and maybe calcium as well).
So a logical question to ask is whether or not you are really Mg-deficient. Taking a look at Wikipedia, you can find a nice list of symptoms that a magnesium deficiency might cause. They include hyperexcitability, muscular symptoms (cramps, tremors, spasms, weakness, etc.), fatigue, loss of appetite, apathy, confusion, sound and light sensitivity, anxiety, insomnia, irritability, poor memory, and reduced ability to learn. (This is just for a mild deficiency, mind you.) Interestingly, tendon issues are not listed. Nor are tendon issues listed on the official National Institute of Health website for magnesium.
Kind of makes you wonder.
It’s a nice trick that supplement companies and others try to pull on consumers. First, they note that substance X is necessary for proper function of structure Y in the body. Then they say that if structure Y isn’t working correctly, you should think about supplementing with substance X. The problem is, unless you’re actually, clinically deficient in X, taking more of it isn’t going to help Y. It’s like trying to put more gas in a car when the tank is already full. Unless you’re running on fumes, more gas isn’t going to help.
Most estimates put westerners with a magnesium deficiency at somewhere between 3 and 15% of the population. That means that even if we accept the higher number, 85% of the people in America do NOT have a Mg deficiency. So right there, the odds are in your favor.
But it is possible that you might be one of the unlucky ones. In which case, should you run out and start buying Mg supplements?
How is this supposed to work, anyway?
The theory behind recommending magnesium for tendon pain goes something like this:
You need two types of mineral to make a muscle work. Calcium makes it possible to contract the muscle, and magnesium enables the muscle to relax. If you lack magnesium, then you theoretically will not be able to “uncontract” your muscles, thus resulting in constant tension. Since tendons are what connect muscles to bones, this tension will transfer into the tendon, and after a certain point cause tendon pain to occur.
That’s the theory, anyway. But it doesn’t take much to understand that, if this really were the case, a systemic Mg deficiency would result in muscles all over your body – whichever ones you happened to be using at the time – locking up pretty quickly. Your legs would freeze in mid-stride, your fingers would cramp up if you were writing…shaking someone’s hand would result in the two of you being joined at the palm for quite a bit longer than is socially acceptable. Not to mention that you’d get muscle cramps so severe that any incidental tendon pain would seem pretty minor by comparison. Can you imagine yourself with a full-body charlie-horse?
Obviously, this is not what happens. But it does suggest a second question: Can you relax your muscles? Yes or no?
If a lack of Mg is preventing muscles from relaxing, and therefore causing excess stress on the tendons, it stands to reason that if you can relax your muscles, tendon issues will not develop. Makes sense, right? It’s an easy, common sense test.
So many different types of magnesium
Finally, there are self-styled “experts” out there who recommend “magnesium” supplements for tendon pain…but never get around to telling you what type of magnesium you should be taking.
Just try some “Magnesium,” bro.
This is a problem because there are many different types of magnesium supplements, and most of them have specific effects on specific tissues. I’ll list a few of the most common ones here for reference:
Magnesium Oxide – This is the one used in most Mg supplements, simply because it’s plentiful in the Earth’s crust (in fact, it’s the eighth most common element) and easy to find. Unfortunately, it has very low bioavailability…like less than five percent. Magnesium hydroxide – basically the same thing once magnesium oxide gets into the body – is also the main ingredient in Milk of Magnesia (now you know where the name comes from) and is a laxative. It does not specifically target tendon or muscle tissues.
Magnesium Citrate – Combined with citric acid. Mg citrate is only about 13% magnesium, so probably not the best bang for your buck if you want it for tendon pain…or anything else.
Then there are a bunch of Mg/amino acid chelates:
Magnesium Glycinate – Mg combined with glycine. Optimum bioavailability, probably the best supplement option if you’re looking to raise overall magnesium levels.
Magnesium Orotate – Mg plus orotic acid. Supposed heart health support, but the jury’s still out. Costs a lot more than other Mg supps. Also supposedly better bioavailability, but the research does not support this claim.
Magnesium Taurate – Mg combined with taurine, which is a nootropic. Formulated specifically for brain health, not tendons.
Magnesium L-Threonate – Promotes mental sharpness and cognitive health. Developed and patented by MIT, this one will likely cost you more than other Mg supplements, and was also specifically formulated for brain function.
Magnesium Malate – Mg combined with malic acid, which comes mainly from fruit. Supports ATP production and cellular energy. No particular effect on tendons or muscles.
Conclusion:
So let’s recap. First, it is true that a sufficient level of magnesium is necessary for muscles to work properly. And it is true that there are some people, mostly through a lack of proper diet, who are deficient in Mg.
However, at least 85% of the population is not deficient, and, of those who are, most are subclinical (ie, they don’t show any outward signs of a problem). Of the ones who do, muscle and/or tendon issues simply don’t happen frequently enough to for any reputable website to list them. So the odds that you are suffering from a clinical Mg deficiency that’s causing tendon pain are very, very slim.
Second, There is no research on humans showing a relationship between a lack of magnesium and tendon pain. While there is some research on animals, in almost all of it the animals were given a clinically induced Mg deficiency. Needless to say, an animal with an unnatural mineral deficiency has limited application or carry-over to a human without one.
Third, there are no magnesium supplement types that specifically target muscle (or tendon) tissue. In fact, most magnesium supplements preferentially and specifically target other areas of the body.
So the answer is no, supplementing with magnesium will very probably not help your tendon pain in the slightest. Supplementation might help with some other condition, but if you have tendon pain, don’t waste your money.
However, if I still haven’t convinced you and you think that a lack of magnesium is causing your tendon pain, the best idea is to try and get some more Mg in your diet. Nuts and vegetables are good for this, as are bananas and avocados. Alcohol is not. A few days of less drinking and more eating the right types of foods will go a lot further to correct any tendon pain-related Mg imbalance in your body than taking a pill.
I received an email the other day from a Target Tendonitis customer. His name is Anton, and he’s a professional level violinist.
Here’s the email, slightly edited:
Hello Alex,
Just wanted to share some updates and ideas, so you can help more people:
Your exercises definitely work, and healed about 95% of the issue, allowing me to get back to normal.
What I find hard to ignore are strong anecdotal benefits of creatine and collagen supplementation that I have discovered when I actually wasn’t trying those supplements for my hand, I tried them for something else, creatine for exercise, and collagen for skin etc. I did not change any other parameters in my diet or lifestyle or exercise routine, but upon starting creatine I noticed several times that my hand is stronger and feels better in general. This was a sudden change exactly when I started creatine. I would say my hand went to like 97% normal. Then several months later I tried collagen and repeatedly again noticed that my hand is nearing 98-99% total healing and is definitely more pain free and stronger than before collagen.
Joint supplements help, but they help more just for my stretching and demanding hand work during the violin playing which is tough on aging joints. With these supplements I feel like I’m 18. My hand recovers instantly, I can play all day the hardest pieces.
Hope all is well,
Anton Polezhayev
You can listen to Anton playing in this video. (Do yourself a favor and check it out. He’s really good!)
As for the benefits of the supplements Anton mentioned, I’d like to give my own opinion. First, there is no doubt that creatine is effective. It is the most-studied bodybuilding supplement in existence (maybe the most studied, period), and both anecdotal and clinical evidence is overwhelming. Creatine works for building muscle.
However, tendons are made of collagen, and collagen takes over 200 days to regenerate, even in young, healthy subjects. So to say that creatine produces an immediate (and noticeable) effect on tendon health is, to my mind, a pretty bold claim. I think that something else is probably happening instead. When you have a tendon issue, you of course try to avoid using a particular bodypart in a particular manner. As a result, the muscles attached to the affected tendon will atrophy to a certain extent. My feeling is that when the Target Tendonitis exercises made it possible for Anton’s tendons to heal, his muscles were still somewhat in “catch up mode” and hadn’t yet recovered 100%.
Enter creatine. There’s no question it works, and any bodybuilder will tell you that, if you take enough of it, results appear very quickly. So when Anton started taking it, it produced an immediate and noticeable effect on the muscles, which then led to better playing and enhanced recovery.
Again, there’s no question that creatine works for muscles. And it’s cheap. (You can get a kilo of my favorite version here, for instance, for about sixteen bucks.) No one has an allergy to it. So if you’re having some trouble healing up that last little bit, try some.
As for supplementing with collagen, my feeling is that it simply doesn’t work. I’m planning to write a fairly long post giving my reasons, but basically I don’t see a mechanism for ingested collagen to somehow travel through the body intact and then “join up” with tendon collagen to help repair the tissue. Basically, taking collagen for tendon pain (or smoother skin, or repair of any collagen structure in the body) is pretty much like eating bull testicles and hoping that it improves your potency. (There’s another very good write-up here that you can read if you like. It’s a little heavy on the scientific jargon, but the author’s take on the issue is exactly correct.) Furthermore, there is no scientific evidence that I know of supporting the idea.
But as Anton says, a lot of people seem to swear by it, so maybe there’s something there. (If it’s true that the plural of anecdote is not “data”, it’s also true that it should be “Hmm… That might bear looking into…”) And as with creatine, the stuff is cheap and widely available. So if you feel like it could help, feel free to try it out. If you do, please let me know via a comment on this thread how things work out for you.
If you check around the internet, you’ll see any number of sites that promote glucosamine supplements for joint pain. Some of them promote glucosamine for tendon pain as well…but is it really effective?
Glucosamine has a lot going for it. It’s cheap, widely available, easily absorbed by the body, and better tolerated in people than NSAIDs such as aspirin and ibuprofen. The pain-relieving effects last longer than NSAIDs, too (even if it’s not as fast-acting). Furthermore, unlike some other supplements it has been extensively studied in clinical settings, with thousands of subjects. And sales in the USA top over a billion dollars a year, so clearly a lot of people think that something good is going on. Let’s take a look and see exactly what’s what.
Joints are made up mainly of cartilage, and glucosamine has been shown in dozens of scientific studies to have a beneficial effect on cartilage formation. While the exact mechanism isn’t clearly understood, it seems that taking glucosamine helps your joints heal because your body is able to manufacture cartilage at an increased rate. Older people in particular benefit from this effect, as rates of production tend to decline with age.
Furthermore, according to some studies glucosamine’s action can be enhanced by combining it with other natural substances such as chondroitin and/or MSM. This combination seems to be especially effective for certain types of arthritis (osteoarthritis in particular), and both clinical and anecdotal evidence point to the fact that it works.
So what about the effects of these substances on tendonitis? People assume that because tendons connect muscles to bones, and because these connections generally occur near joints, tendons themselves are also composed of cartilage. Unfortunately, this assumption is incorrect. Without getting too technical, tendons and joints are different. Among other factors, tendons have blood vessels (which cartilage does not) and are made up mostly of fibrous collagen, not cartilage. There is absolutely no evidence that glucosamine, chondroitin or MSM have any beneficial effect whatsoever on collagen formation.
So if you’re looking for a solution to tendon pain and find yourself at a site that is trying to sell you a glucosamine supplement (with or without chondroitin or MSM) to help deal with it, you might want to look elsewhere. To put it bluntly, sites that try to tell you that a cartilage-building supplement will heal collagen structures simply do not know what they’re talking about. A better supplement idea would be to get a really good COX-2 inhibitor like Repair Gold, and a better overall nutritional strategy would be to examine your diet and make sure that it’s not too weighted with Omega-6 fats.
If you’re suffering from tendon pain, rest assured there is something you can do about it. For one thing, my blog has plenty of good information that can help you out. And if you want a guaranteed solution to the type of tendon problem that over 90% of long-term sufferers experience, try Target Tendonitis. You can test-drive my program risk-free for 60 days, but it won’t take that long for you to start seeing results. Target Tendonitis will have you feeling better and well on the road back to your normal activities – permanently – within two to three weeks or your money back.
Last time I started talking about what one would want in an ideal supplement. So, enough teasing. Here is the answer to the question of what supplement has, in my opinion, the best overall effect on a person’s health:
Garlic.
But not just any garlic. The type of garlic I’m talking about has been specially treated to unleash the full effect and power of the plant. But before getting to that, let’s cover a little background:
Garlic is known basically all over the world as having a positive effect on health. Whether it’s your Italian grandmother putting it into the pasta, the Koreans adding it to pretty much everything, or people on the Indian subcontinent using it in Ayurvedic medicine, I honestly can’t think of a single culture that doesn’t know about it and think that it’s great. But there are a couple of problems associated with its use.
One is the smell. If you eat a lot of garlic, you’re going to reek of the stuff. It’ll come out on your breath, in your sweat…basically everywhere…and make you as unpopular with potential romantic partners as it will with vampires. Not really ideal, right?
The second is, from a health point of view, a more serious problem: getting enough of the stuff into your system to allow garlic to work its magic. The active ingredient in garlic is something called allicin. And when you eat garlic, and it passes through the liver, most of the allicin gets destroyed. Regular cooking also destroys allicin, so the only way to get enough of the stuff into your body to do you any good is to eat massive amounts of raw garlic…which brings us back to problem number one. Also, a lot of people find raw garlic to be irritating to the throat and stomach. Again, not exactly ideal.
But there is a better solution available. Some very smart people discovered that if you bind certain minerals to the garlic molecule, you can form a protective coating. This process is called chelation, and if you ingest chelated garlic in the form of a pill, the cooking process is bypassed and the allicin will be protected as it passes through your liver. This occurs because the chelating minerals will be stripped off and destroyed, leaving the allicin largely intact and able to deliver its health benefits at almost 100% strength.
Now, if small amounts of cooked garlic are good enough for cultures around the world to celebrate their health benefits, you would expect full-strength garlic to produce some pretty spectacular effects. And in fact this is exactly what happens. You won’t “feel it” in the sense of super-charging your body or anything, but it will jack up your immune system to the point that nothing short of full blown influenza will even make a dent. Minor sore throats and colds will become things of the past. Fevers will not occur. If you suffer from canker sores, they will vanish. (This is how I found the product, as I used to get canker sores quite frequently. No longer.) Basically, unless there’s something on the level of a Black Plague epidemic going around, you just stop getting sick.
I don’t know about you, but the downtime and loss of productivity that happens when you get sick is a cost I don’t even want to try to calculate. Forget about the aches and pains and discomfort associated with colds and flu, just the potential loss of income is enough to make me okay with paying quite a lot to stay out of the doctor’s office.
And yet, chelated garlic is cheap. For about fifty cents a day you can have a fantastically strong immune system, no matter how old you are. And on top of that it’s GMO-free, gluten-free, 100% natural, vegan…there’s really no reason not to take it. So I do.
If you look around the net, you can find a lot of different garlic supplements for sale. Frankly, most of them aren’t worth much. They either don’t deliver enough garlic to make taking the supplement worthwhile, or they cost too much, or they lack the all-important chelation that makes the stuff work. But there are a few good ones. The best I’ve found, for both quality of ingredients and manufacturing and low cost, is from Frontline Nutraceuticals. They sell chelated garlic in a supplement called Canker Samurai for less than $20 a bottle, and if you order more than one bottle you can get shipping and so on for free. The sales page is here if you want to take a look.
In Part 1 of this post, I promised you some references to back up all the claims I’ve made. Here they are:
