Tag: supplements for tendon pain

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Another testimonial for Target Tendonitis

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.

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Glucosamine for tendon pain?

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.

target tendonitis ebook

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Nutrition for Tendons

I recently received a question from someone who purchased Target Tendonitis. He asked about the advisability of fasting if you have tendonosis, so I thought I’d talk a little bit about nutrition for tendons.

Although fasting can have some beneficial effects, I do not advise anyone who is suffering from tendon or fascia problems to do it. The reason is simple: your body needs nutrients to heal itself, and if you’re fasting you’re not providing it with the basic “stuff” that’s necessary to do the job. I recommend some nutritional supplements in the book, but these recommendations are based on the assumption that your basic nutritional needs are already being met. If they aren’t, the supplements aren’t going to do you much good by themselves. A diet that is lacking in vitamins, minerals or protein (to say nothing of all three at once!) is going to pose serious, serious problems when it comes to healing your tendons.

Assuming that your basic diet is okay, one thing you can do to help heal yourself if you have tendonosis or fasciosis is get a good kelp supplement and take it regularly. Kelp contains iodine, which is helpful for the formation of collagen, the basic building block of tendons and fasciae. My favorite out of the products listed on Amazon is Icelandic kelp, which is harvested during the cold months and washed in high-mineral fresh water, which adds further minerals to the already good mix that kelp naturally contains.

Icelandic Sea Kelp for tendons

Note, however, that just taking a supplement isn’t going to be enough to cure yourself if you have long-term tendon pain. Anything over about two weeks is most likely going to be tendonosis, not tendonitis (I know, I know, but believe me, your doctor is wrong. Do the research yourself and see.), and in that case the collagen fibers in your tendon have become either bunched or damaged to the point that they are going to require actual realignment in order to work properly. This is what the exercises in Target Tendonitis provide (along with a lot more detail about the nutritional side of things), and why it has such a high success rate for people who haven’t seen much effect from nutritional therapies alone. A combined, holistic approach works much more quickly than any single measure.