The Uplifted Insider

"You cannot build a great building on a weak foundation. You must have a solid foundation if you're going to have a strong superstructure." — Gordon B. Hinckley

There’s More To Consider Than Just Muscle & Fat

Close your eyes and imagine a gym, real or fictitious, that has people going about their workouts with dumbbells, barbells, pulleys, machines or any other piece of gym equipment. If I were to ask you what their reason for being in the gym is, you would probably say that they were there to build bigger, stronger muscles and you would not be wrong. If you were to talk to these weightlifters, they would probably tell you exactly what muscles they were focusing on that day. Whether it was a chest day, a back and biceps session or even the widely dreaded leg day. Some structure it differently, using upper/lower body splits and some people enjoy a constant flow of total body workouts. These workout splits may divide up the body differently but the focus is still purely on the muscles in every one. Is this mainstream way of thinking short-sighted though? Is this an oversimplification of the human body that creates tunnel vision for dedicated gym-goers? Is there more to consider when strengthening your body and creating the strongest version of yourself?

I believe that there definitely is more to consider and if you are someone that regularly hits the gym and/or someone that is interested in learning more about how the human body works, have you ever asked yourself any of the following questions?

What is holding all of my muscle together?

What is transmitting all of that force from the muscle to the bone?

What other soft tissues are there in my body besides muscle?

The answer to all of those questions is your connective tissue. More precisely, I am referring to your tendons, fascia, ligaments, and joint capsules.

The Gym Is Not Like The Real World

Consider the title of this section and the following statements. The gym is a controlled, predictable environment. The floor does not move. The barbell does not fight back. The resistance is smooth. You initiate every movement, you know when it is coming, and you can stop motion whenever you want.

In contrast, the “real world” offers varying degrees of chaos. In environments outside the gym, force often arrives uninvited. For example, you step off a curb without realizing it and your ankle turns awkwardly underneath the weight of your leg or you plant your foot in the grass to change direction in a flag football game and it twists as it slips into a mole-sized divot. When these things happen, your body has to respond in milliseconds to positions your training program probably has never explored and through ranges your tissues have never been loaded in order to escape injury.

These positions and ranges, which either remain unexplored or leave you unable to actively produce and withstand force, are not only a major blind spot in athletic training but in training for life as well. The way to shrink that blind spot and decrease your chances of injury is to gradually strengthen your connective tissue strategically through your training.

Let’s Get A Handle On Connective Tissue

Different types of connective tissues have unique ways of behaving, adapting and failing. Let’s discuss!

Tendons are dense collagen cords that connect muscle to bone and transmit the force your muscles generate into actual movement. However, they are capable of more than just transmitting force. Additionally, they store and release elastic energy like internal springs. A healthy and trained Achilles tendon, for example, stores energy with every ground contact and releases it in order to propel you forward. Dr. Keith Baar, one of the world's leading researchers on connective tissue at UC Davis, describes this energy transfer as one of the primary determinants of athletic performance. He points out that athletes with stiffer, better-conditioned tendons transmit force faster and more efficiently. Envision the difference between a taut rope (tendon in good condition) and an elastic band (tendon in poor condition) when you pull on a weight. Lastly, an undertrained tendon will accumulate unnoticeable damage leading up to a potential “freak injury.”

Fascia is the continuous web of connective tissue that wraps around every muscle, organ, and joint in your body. Most people have never heard of fascia, let alone thought about it, despite the fact that it is literally everywhere in your body. Fascia transmits force across entire regions of the body and is loaded with nerve receptors that feed directly into how your brain maps your body in space. When fascia becomes restricted, scarred, or chronically dehydrated, the quality of sensory information it sends to your brain degrades. This degradation affects every movement you make. Fascia researcher Robert Schleip demonstrated this when he measured the fascia thickness across the throwing shoulder of a world-record javelin thrower versus his non-throwing shoulder. The non-throwing side measured roughly half a millimeter. The throwing side measured three millimeters, an incredible six times thicker. This result is the outcome of a lifetime of specific, deliberate loading.

Ligaments and Joint Capsules provide passive stability to your joints, protect end range positions, and give your brain constant feedback about where your joints are in space. Ligaments are discrete bands or cords that connect bone to bone across a joint. For example, the ACL connects the femur to the tibia. Joint capsules differ in that they are more like sleeves or envelopes that surround the entire joint, enclosing the joint space and providing more general stability rather than specific directional resistance. An unfortunate fact about ligaments is that once they are significantly damaged, they do not fully regenerate to their original state. Baar’s research confirmed this. He found that once significant degeneration has occurred, the structural properties of the tissue are permanently changed.

Connective Tissue Is Slower To Develop Than Muscle

When you train, muscle responds to load quickly. Within weeks of a new stimulus you can really feel stronger, fuller, more capable. The results are very apparent in a relatively short period of time. This quick feedback loop is one of the things that makes training rewarding. However, connective tissue is a different animal.

Tendons, ligaments, and fascia are composed primarily of collagen and have poor blood supply relative to muscle. They remodel over a much longer timeline than muscle does. When you increase your training load by starting a new program, a heavier phase, or one with more volume, your muscles begin adapting while your tendons and ligaments remain the same structurally for a longer time period. As a result, in that period of time where your muscles have gotten bigger and stronger, your connective tissues are transmitting forces they have not yet had time to appropriately develop for.

The gap between muscular readiness and connective tissue readiness is a primary contributor to what people call “freak injuries.” Some examples are the torn Achilles you suffer as you accelerate during a friendly foot race against your competitive best friend, the patellar tendon that gives out during a routine jump while playing basketball with your kids or the ACL that tears while skiing a mountain slope that you have spent your whole life on. These are sudden injuries that feel very random and unlucky. Many times they are not. The load accumulation that created the vulnerable tissue happened weeks or months earlier, when everything still felt fine and progress was on schedule. The muscle was ready. The connective tissue, however, was not.

In addition, Baar's research revealed another intriguing bit of information. Within just three days of immobilization or rest, a tendon loses 15 to 20 percent of its collagen. Muscle will only lose 5 to 10 percent over the same period. Then, consider the fact that rebuilding that lost collagen will take approximately eight weeks. When you put all this information together you realize that just three days of being sick in bed will set your connective tissue back significantly.

There Is No Tendon Warning Signal

When you train your muscles too hard, they give you feedback, like delayed onset muscle soreness, which tells you to ease up and recover. Your tendons do not work this way. There is no equivalent warning signal from connective tissue. You can accumulate significant damage in a tendon over weeks or months and feel absolutely nothing. That is until something suddenly tears.

This is exactly why so many tendon injuries seem to come out of nowhere. They did not come out of nowhere. The damage had been building silently through a process called stress shielding, where the healthy strong parts of the tendon absorb all the load and shield the damaged weaker parts from receiving any stimulus to repair themselves. The healthy parts protect the damaged parts so well that the damaged tissue never gets the signal it needs to heal. The connective tissue just quietly deteriorates until the strong parts fatigue enough to let the load through all at once.

Your Passive Vs. Your Active Range Of Motion

Every joint has two different ranges of motion. Your passive range is how far the joint can move when an external force moves it. For example, when a therapist or even gravity pushes a body part into a stretch, the joint’s passive range is being explored. Your active range is how far you can move that joint yourself using muscular effort to produce force.

For most people, there is a decent-sized difference between the two ranges of motion, often 15 to 40 degrees at major joints. That 15 to 40 degrees is unexplored territory. It exists, but your nervous system has not mapped it and your muscles cannot generate force there. Therefore, if sport or life forces you into that gap unexpectedly through a stumble, a collision, or a reactive deceleration, you will find yourself in a position without any active muscular protection. This is the moment when tissues fail.

The reason that this gap exists is due to a structure called the Golgi Tendon Organ, also known as the GTO. The GTO is a tension-monitoring sensor embedded at the junction between muscle and tendon. When tension rises to a level the nervous system judges as potentially dangerous, the GTO fires an inhibitory signal that involuntarily reduces muscular force. The muscle backs off. The tissue is protected.

If you think about it, this is a brilliant protective system, and is yet another example of why the human body is so amazing. However, the downside of this protective system is that the GTO's threshold is calibrated by experience. If you have never trained a joint through its full range under load, your GTO has no evidence that tension at end range is safely possible. So it activates early and often, long before the tissue is actually in danger. In these situations you will feel like you cannot generate force in certain positions. This is not because your muscles are weak, but because your nervous system has not been given permission to go there. The good news is that this threshold is trainable through progressive, controlled exposure to end range tension. This training process is known as GTO desensitization.

Connective Tissue Training

Baar's research, combined with the work of researchers like Jill Cook and Michael Kjaer, has given us great insight into what actually drives connective tissue adaptation. The key takeaway here should be that connective tissue requires a different training signal than muscle does.

Every time you load a tendon you generate two competing signals simultaneously. The first is an anabolic signal that drives collagen synthesis and structural remodeling. And the second is a catabolic signal that breaks tissue down. The goal of smart connective tissue training is to maximize the anabolic signal while minimizing the catabolic signal.

Dynamic fast movements generate both signals, some anabolic stimulus but significant catabolic wear and tear. This is because of what is known as jerk, a term that describes the rate of change of acceleration. Every sudden change of direction, every explosive movement, every rapid loading and unloading of a tendon creates jerk. And jerk is the primary mechanism behind most tendon injuries such as tennis elbow, jumper's knee, and Achilles tendinopathy. Tendons are great at handling load. However, they struggle with rapid unpredictable changes in load direction or force.

Long-duration isometric holds, which are sustained muscular contractions at or near end range of motion, held for 10 seconds or more, almost exclusively generate the anabolic signal with minimal catabolic effect. This is why Baar's engineered ligament research showed that four 30-second isometric holds produced stronger, more resilient tendons than dynamic repetitions covering the exact same time under tension. The isometric group built stronger tissue. The dynamic group built bigger but actually less stiff tissue, meaning it was more vulnerable under an explosive load.

The adaptive signal from a tendon peaks at around 10 minutes of loading and then stops. Everything beyond 10 minutes is additional wear and tear without additional benefit to the specific tendon. After 6 to 8 hours, the signal resets and the tissue is ready for another full stimulus. This means you can train the same tendons twice per day and get double the adaptive stimulus daily with minimal catabolic wear and tear.

The dosing that Baar recommends for injured or chronically problematic tendons is four sets of 30-second isometric holds with 2 minutes of rest between sets, roughly 10 minutes of total session time. Intensity should be around 40 to 50 percent of maximum effort, pain free. Additionally, for healthy tendon maintenance, Baar found that 10-second holds are sufficient.

Why Passive Stretching Is An Ineffective Long-term Solution

Passive stretching, which is holding a stretched position for a short time period while standing still, may feel good but it does not produce the lasting changes you might think it does. The reason is that the nervous system's protective response to the restricted ranges was built from loaded, tensile signals. Passive stretching does not provide such signals. The GTO's threat assessment does not update from a passive stretch. The brain barely revises its model. The restriction will return within hours of the stretch.

So what actually changes the brain's assessment? The answer is Active tension at end range. Three ways to achieve this are isometric holds, slow eccentrics, and loaded stretching. These exercises provide the needed evidence for the brain to accept that the body entered the restricted range, generated force there and that the tissue held. This is the signal that recalibrates the GTO, expands the active range, and eventually creates lasting access to positions that previously felt inaccessible. It takes more time and effort than passive stretching but it is far more effective at increasing your active range of motion.

The Role Of Collagen & Vitamin C

Baar's research has also identified a nutritional protocol that optimally supports connective tissue adaptation. Taking 10 to 15 grams of hydrolyzed collagen combined with 200 milligrams of vitamin C approximately 45 to 60 minutes before loading has been shown to double the markers of new collagen formation compared to a control group. The timing matters because tendons, ligaments, and fascia have poor blood supply. Since blood flow throughout the body’s connective tissue is not good, tendons, ligaments, and fascia get their nutrients from the compression and release cycle of mechanical loading instead. Having collagen amino acids and vitamin C circulating in your bloodstream at the same time as you are loading allows these nutrients to get drawn directly into the tissue being worked.

Important Side-Note: Make sure to consume bovine or fish skin-based hydrolyzed collagen rather than bone broth-based products. Skin sources avoid the heavy metal sequestration that can occur in bone products. Also, adding a small amount of whey protein alongside the collagen is even more effective. The leucine in whey activates the cellular process that drives protein synthesis by telling your connective tissue cells to use those collagen building blocks. The combination of collagen plus vitamin C plus whey protein provides both the raw materials and the cellular signal to use them.

A Few Ways To Apply This Information

There are countless ways to apply the information that we have gone over in this newsletter. Here are four of them:

1) Add a short connective tissue session to your morning routine three to five times per week. It does not need to be long. Ten minutes for connective tissue is the full adaptive dose. For example, ten minutes focusing on the quad tendon with deep lunge holds and wall-sits is sufficient. This includes rest times as well. Go through a series of isometric holds in the positions most relevant to your training, sport, life and weak links. Below are three examples:

-Deep Lunge Holds, which target the Achilles, patellar, hamstring, hip flexor and quad tendons.

-Wall-Sit Holds, to recruit the quad, patellar and hamstring tendons.

-Single Leg Calf Raise Holds, for the Achilles, FHL, peroneal and tibialis posterior tendons, as well as the plantar fascia.

Hold each position for 30 seconds, or adjust the duration based on your current ability level. If you feel a sharp pain, end the set and reassess. However, a burning sensation is normal and acceptable.

2) Add slow eccentrics to your existing training. Whatever movements you are already doing, slow the lowering phase down to 3 to 5 seconds per rep. This is one of the most powerful stimuli available for connective tissue remodeling and it costs you nothing except a little extra time.

3) Take collagen and vitamin C before these sessions. Even better if you consume these nutrients with whey protein. It is also important to note that consistent daily intake matters more than perfect timing.

4) Be patient! Muscle adapts in weeks. Connective tissue adapts in months. The athletes who build truly durable, resilient bodies are the ones who understand this timeline and commit to the work even when the results are not immediately visible. The tissue is remodeling and the nervous system is updating its maps. The timelines of muscle and connective tissue adaptation are just different.

Concluding Thoughts

When you think of the gym and lifting weights, thoughts on muscle size, strength numbers, and body composition probably pop to the forefront of your mind. Conversely, the connective tissue system that holds all of it together is rarely acknowledged. For most, this system is a relative afterthought until a serious injury occurs.

After reading this article, you now understand that your tendons, fascia, and ligaments are far from passive bystanders in your training. They are adaptive, load-responsive structures with their own characteristics, their own requirements, and their own timeline. For many people, certain connective tissues are a weak link because these tissues have not been given the specific signals that are needed to undergo necessary adaptations.

You might be surprised to hear that musculoskeletal injuries as an aggregate are the number one cost to the US healthcare system. Their cost is more than diabetes and heart disease combined. It is important to understand that this is not just a concern for athletes. For everyday adults, declining connective tissue health drives pain, reduces movement quality, limits independence, and ultimately drives the metabolic disease that follows when people can no longer move freely. While there are certainly situations that are beyond your control, you should not just accept your injury-prone, achy joints as an inevitable, immutable condition either. Building strong connective tissue over the course of many years will make you more durable.

If you remember just one thing from today’s newsletter, I want it to be that building a resilient body requires more than strong muscles. It requires building connective tissue that can handle the forces that those muscles generate, joints that can function through their full range under load, and a nervous system that has been given permission to go where life demands. The construction of a robust network of connective tissue involves the strategic insertion of the methods discussed in the previous section into your training plan.

Your training plan does not have to be completely different, it just has to be altered to include deliberate strengthening of your connective tissues. If you want to be strong and mobile deep into your life, then this is the training you need to do. You should not “feel old” at thirty, your life should not get less physically active at forty, and working out in your fifties, sixties, and seventies should be the norm, not an outlier. Start easy. Be consistent. Play the long game. Your future self will thank you.

Need Some Extra Help To Train Smarter?

If you would like personalized guidance on building a program that addresses not just strength and muscle, but the connective tissue resilience and movement quality that make those things sustainable for life, I would love to help. I have spent fifteen years helping people build strong, durable bodies from the inside out.

My online coaching program includes customized programming, nutritional guidance, and ongoing one-on-one support to make sure you are training smart and building a strong body that lasts a lifetime.

Click here to apply for customized online personal training today!

While I love lifting heavy, I believe that a truly strong body is not necessarily one that can lift large amounts of weight at one particular point in time, but rather a body that can withstand the rigors of life, both in and out of the gym, for multiple decades.