Just a quick post to illustrate what a good breakfast can look like:
A good breakfast
What you see above is eight egg whites scrambled with some pepper and other herbs, some leftover dirty rice from last night’s dinner and a few blackberries. Lots of protein, some good carbs and some micronutrients from the berries to top things off. (Generally speaking, the darker the fruit the more it has in the way of antioxidants and so on. Blackberries are great for that—they have a class of antioxidants called anthocyanins that, in addition to a host of other benefits, can help reduce inflammation. And that translates into healthier tendons.)
Depending on your goals, you might want to add a little more protein to the meal. An egg white has about three grams of protein, so eight of them comes out to 24 grams total. I personally like to get at least 30g of protein in each of my five meals, so I’d probably add half a scoop of a veggie protein powder (10g) to make sure I’m covered.
After over four decades in the fitness biz, I’ve come to believe that the reason someone will or won’t exercise is a little more subtle than just “willpower”. People who would never even think about exercise will suddenly warp their lives around it if the proper incentive is there. A high school reunion, becoming single again and going back on the market…
A very distant second is finding the right type of exercise for a particular individual. I love being in a gym, but don’t do nearly as well exercising outdoors with bodyweight stuff, for example. A distance runner friend once remarked about how funny it was — he would happily go slog through a cold muddy 40k in the rain but found weight training utterly boring. Other people enjoy rowing, or tennis, or swimming.
I view motivating someone to exercise more like picking a lock than trying to inject them with willpower. Older people will often respond to simple self-interest (“Start exercising or you’ll die.”) if they’ve just had a health scare. Young people will get into it if they think that it’ll make them more attractive. You find the right combination and pretty much anyone will do it.
Some things are good for preventing tendon issues, and some things are good for fixing them. Nutrition is one area that’s good for both, so eating for tendon health is really essential.
I consider breakfast the most important meal of the day. And when I coach people for personal training and fitness, the first step on the nutrition side is something I call GOMER. GOMER stands for Get One MEal Right. The idea is to get one meal exactly right every day. And the meal I generally start with is—you guessed it—breakfast.
Eating for physique purposes is generally pretty straightforward: each meal should contain a lean protein source and some type of fiber. In practice this usually means something like a chicken breast and a cup or so of salad.
If you’re doing sports, the equation changes. You’ll want to add in some carbohydrates, especially if you’re doing any kind of low intensity endurance work like distance running. The exact amount of carbs will vary depending on your training schedule and what you’re trying to accomplish.
But eating for tendon health is a little more complicated. You definitely still need protein, because tendons are made of collagen and collagen is built from protein. But you also want to limit inflammation as much as possible, and meat—which is where most people get their protein—does tend to increase inflammation in the body.
So what’s the solution?
Studies have clearly shown that a plant-based diet is superior to one that includes a lot of animal-based food. And if you are going to eat animal stuff, fish (pescatarian) and dairy (lacto-ovo vegetarian) present a better “inflammation option” than red meat.
Now, I don’t expect anyone to make the switch to vegan/vegetarian just based on this blog post. I myself still eat a fair amount of animal-based food. But it does make sense to increase one’s plant-based choices where possible.
One easy switch is to use a plant-based protein powder (if you use protein powder at all). Another is to use egg whites more than yolks, to substitute tofu for one meat meal, and so on. There are plenty of small changes you can make to start tipping the inflammation scales in your favor.
So in that vein, I present the first part of the breakfast I had this morning:
Egg whites and half an apple
It consisted of nine egg whites and one yolk, along with half an apple. (Yes, I took a bite out of the apple before I took the picture. I was hungry.) Later on, I had a protein shake:
Altogether that added up to a little over fifty grams of protein, with a little fiber thrown in to help things along. About half the meal was plant-based, and the animal-based other half was from relatively benign sources. So all in all, a win for the morning.
Exercise form matters, especially if you’re in the gym a lot. Plenty of people do triceps extensions to help build up their arms, but probably over ninety percent of them are doing it “wrong” in terms of helping to avoid elbow tendon pain.
The short explanation is: keep your upper arms slightly off the vertical line while performing the exercise. This will place less stress on the tendon and more on the triceps, especially the long head.
You’ll probably need to drop the weight slightly if you use this new form, but you’ll be rewarded with better muscle contraction and be less likely to develop tendon pain as a result.
This is one of those times when seeing is easily is worth a thousand words, so I’ve put together this very short video. Click on the link below to take a look:
Pretty self-explanatory. Honestly, if you’re young you probably won’t have an issue either way, but anyone over the age of about thirty-five should start taking a good hard look at their exercise form and cleaning it up where appropriate. And at any age, if you start feeling pain when you put your elbows on a table a day or two after doing this exercise, that’s a warning sign that you need to fix something. Don’t let exercise form complacency cost you weeks or months of lost time in rehab.
People who spend a lot of time in gyms know about the importance of post-workout nutrition. But they usually only think about how it affects their muscles (and sometimes their bodyfat).
However, that insulin spike your get shunts nutrients into all sorts of areas that need it…including your tendons. Sports nutrition researchers know this (see this article on post-workout nutrition and its effects on various types of tissue for one example) and have tried various nutritional interventions to see what yields the best results.
Unfortunately, not much can really be said for sure when it comes to tendons. We know pretty well what causes muscles to recover best: a 2:1 mix of fast-absorbing carbs and protein, plus some BCAAs thrown in for good measure. But muscles recover quickly. In younger subjects, 48-72 hours is generally all it takes, so scientists can see results in a short amount of time. Tendons, on the other hand, take a while.
Like, months. Lots of months.
So it’s hard to determine results, and hard to say anything for sure. But it makes sense that what’s good for muscles is also good for the structures that support muscles. Muscles are mainly composed of protein; tendons are made of collagen, which is made from protein. So aside from just general good nutrition that avoids excess inflammation and provides you with the correct building blocks to maintain your body in good condition, a good post-workout shake and meal are good ideas. And the older you are in terms of training age, the shorter your window is to get that post-workout shake down. Younger, less trained athletes have a couple of hours, but us older folks only have about 45-60 minutes before the window closes.
So if you’re engaging in stressful training and are over the age of forty, I recommend having your post-workout shake more or less immediately after training. (Personally, I start drinking mine even before I’m done.) And then have a regular meal filled with starchy carbs and a good lean protein source (not too much fat if you can help it) about forty-five minutes to an hour later.
So this is me at sixty. I’ve just gotten done with a workout and I thought I’d take a pic with my new iPhone. It’s funny, I can immediately understand how to use any piece of equipment in the gym—even ones I’ve never seen before—but trying to figure out my iPhone is like learning a new language, lol.
But I finally managed to get the picture, so here it is:
Not too bad for sixty. I don’t have any daily pain or anything. I’m in the gym four days a week, plus maybe a little running or swimming on the off days, and I was sitting at 12.9% bodyfat this afternoon. My joints are fine, my tendons are fine and I don’t take any medications other than a finasteride pill each morning (prostate cancer runs in my family). In fact, except for a compressed disc in my spine I’m basically the same as I was about twenty years ago. I’ve kept about 95% of my strength, and while it’s true that I’m not as fast off a starting line as I used to be, I still enjoy sprinting in the spring and fall. It’s a great way to remain lean.
There’s no real secret to staying in shape. You’ve got to exercise regularly and not eat like an idiot. But it’s true that as we get older it gets easier and easier to injure yourself. And recovering from injuries takes longer as well.
So the best way is not to get injured in the first place! And toward that end, I’m going to be starting a new series of posts to help people prevent tendon and other soft-tissue injuries before they happen. Stay tuned!
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.
Ask anyone whose time in the gym is measured in decades, and they’ll tell you that it’s not the muscles that go first, it’s the soft tissue: the joints and tendons, the spongy discs between your vertebrae, the ligaments holding all your tiny foot bones in their proper place, the cartilage between your ribs…
I’ve written quite a bit about nutrition for keeping your tendons and so on healthy (try the keyword “nutrition” for this website), methods for preventing tendon pain in the first place (foam rolling before a workout and stretching after are great places to start), and a year or two back I started adding some exercise programs that can help (like this post detailing the Hundreds program). Today I’d like to add to that last category, and talk about speed training using weights. Because speed work with weights can have a positive impact on your tendon health.
If you’ve ever tried powerlifting, you know the name Westside. It’s the most famous powerlifting gym in the Western hemisphere, if not the entire world. Louie Simmons and his crew have produced some of the most respected names in the sport, and the number of world champions coming out of the Westside gym in Columbus, Ohio is constantly going up.
They use a lot of advanced training techniques, but the basic Westside template uses something called conjugated periodization. What this means in layman’s terms is simple: you work a particular lift (not a bodypart, like the chest, but a major lift, like the bench press or squat) twice a week, once using very heavy weights and once using very light weights…but training the lift for speed on the light day.
Basically, what you do is take somewhere around 50% of your maximum and do eight sets of three reps, performing the reps as quickly as you can while still maintaining good form. So let’s say your maximum bench press is 120kgs. You would train your speed day using about 60kgs (maybe a little more or less, based on individual characteristics, but you want to use the most weight you can while still being able to pop the weight up very quickly). After a good warm-up, you take the bar and lower it to your chest, pause for a moment, then blast it up as quickly as possible (while still maintaining good form, of course). Like, so quickly that you would launch it from your hands if you weren’t holding on. Perform three reps like this, wait one minute, then repeat for your second set. Do eight sets and then go to assistance work, which would be exercises targeting the triceps, deltoids and so on–the smaller muscles that contribute to the lift. The assistance work should be done conventionally, two or three sets of six to eight reps or thereabouts.
Speed work, because it uses such light weights, is much easier on joints and tendons than conventional weight training. But unlike most light work, training for speed on one’s lifts can add significantly to your 1RM (maximum weight). Try it for a couple of months and see for yourself.
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.
Happy New Year, everyone! Let’s hope that 2022 finally puts an end to 2020, lol.
This year I want to start uploading more video content. It’ll allow me to give more information in a shorter amount of time, and (hopefully) give more specific advice on topics like foam rolling, stretching and so on. Text is great, but for some topics it’s just a lot easier to understand what’s going on if you see someone actually demonstrate them.
I also want to post more frequently. Over the past few years my post count has dropped a lot, but with any luck this year I’ll be able to get content up on a more regular basis. I’m crossing my fingers!
Finally, I’ll be updating the Target Tendonitis and Target Plantar Fasciitis ebooks. The last editions’ information is still good, but there have been a few new developments in both connective tissue research and nutrition that I want to reflect in the books.
So let’s hope that 2022 is when covid is finally put behind us and have a great year! All the best to everyone,
