Today’s podcast features performance coach and tendon expert, Jake Tuura. Jake currently works as a coach and educator who specializes in hypertrophy for athletes, vertical jump development, and patellar tendinopathy rehab. Jake was a collegiate S&C coach for 7 years, with further experience in the private sector at Velocity Training Center.
Performance training is, at its’ core, simple, but within it contains many factors. The tissues involved in training include not only muscle, but bones and connective tissues. These tissues experience loading, not just in a linear manner, but also from a torsional perspective, based on pressure. While muscle tissue is by far the most commonly discussed of the muscle-bone-tendon triad, in understanding more about the tendonous and bony structures, and how they adapt to load, we can have a more thorough understanding of performance and rehab concepts.
For today’s episode, Jake Tuura covers many aspects of tendon health and performance. These include the connective tissue impact of training on hard surfaces, different elements of tendon tissue (collagen fascicles vs. the interfascicular matrix), the impact of variability on tendon health and performance, strength training vs plyometrics in tendon development, long-term developmental concepts of connective tissue in training, and much more.
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Timestamps and Main Points
2:09 – Hard vs. soft surface training, horse racing, and bone adaptations for performance
17:24 – Structural tendon rehab concepts, regarding isometric versus non-specific loading
22:28 – The difference between heavy strength, and high rep plyometric work on tendon health and rehabilitation
24:33 – Key differences between collagen fascicles in the tendon, and the IFM, or interfascicular matrix, and what this means for training and rehab
39:42 – How variability factors into training impacts on the tendon, collagen, and the interfascicular matrix
53:20 – The multi-vector nature of tendon training given plyometric or strength movements
1:01:54 – Training based on the long-term adaptations of the connective tissue, in light of both strength and elasticity
Jake Tuura’s Quotes
“That’s where the issues happen, where the tendon inserts on the bone; it makes me wonder about training on hard surfaces and hard impacts, and adapting that (bone insertion) end of the tendon”
“The tendon hole was completely filled in 5 months later, and that horse didn’t do isometrics… the animal situations where the tendons fill in without the weight room stuff, that’s fascinating”
“You do need movement to load the tendon, but do you have to do the isometrics and heavy strength? I am still going to do them”
“When a bone breaks, it’ll heal normally, but if you injure a tendon, it’ll scar”
“The tendon is stupid, it doesn’t do anything on its own; if you want to get activation, you have to activate your muscle as hard as possible, or get activation through the bone”
“When you are doing lifting, the collagen is crimped and then it goes straight, and you are making that collagen stronger”
“You have the collagen within the fascicles of the tendon, and then outside of those fascicles, you have the infra-fascicular matrix, this gel that allows the fascicles to slide and rotate with one another, and when you do heavy lifting, I don’t think you are doing anything to that gel. But if you went and did hopping, jogging, that’s where the gel component would make the collagen fascicles slide and rotate around each other which would protect them from excess strain, excess linear-pull”
“The gel has linear stress, but it also has compressive stress… to protect the collagen fascicles from excess linear-pull”
“If you have a reactive tendonopathy, and your tendon is blown up and painful, you don’t want to be stressing (the gel) so you don’t want to do jumping, but you will usually be fine to do heavy lifting”
“The fascicles work independently, so when you pull on the tendon, you won’t work all 50 fascicles, you might work 10 fascicles”
“When you injure your tendon, you could only injure 1 fascicle, and have 49 healthy fascicles”
“If you have holes in your tendons, your tendon still works…. you are able to go run because it’s only hurt a few fascicles, and when you give yourself movement variability, you are stressing different fascicles in different manners”
“Spikeball is the best for movement variability”
“That’s one of the hardest things to teach people is their own intuition”
“(where the patellar tendon is enhanced by training the quads) When you get to the achilles tendon, it’s not so much about the calf muscles, you can do all the calf raises in the world, and still get achilles tendon problems”
“When you do laundry, you are getting collagen synthesis”
“This whole thing of doing heavy isos for preventative measures, I’m against that, I don’t think you need to be doing it; just do good normal training”
“Tendon is slow (in development) if you have a strong muscle, you are going to have a strong tendon guaranteed, it is just going to be a delayed thing”
“If you wanted a “super tendon” you need to load for your whole life”
“It’s going to take a long time, you are not going to get these super tendons by doing heavy iso’s for the last two months… you are going to get a super tendon from playing basketball daily for the last 20 years”
“Just look at how kids develop their tendon, through play, and then you try to artificially create it when it gets older, and it doesn’t work the same”
“The horses who were in the pasture’s tendons were two times bigger than the horses who were stuck in the stall, or who were in the stall and walked for an hour a day”
“Right now kids are just playing video games, maybe in 50 years we see everyone rupture their tendons”
About Jake Tuura
Jake Tuura, MS, CSCS currently works as a coach and educator who specializes in hypertrophy for athletes, vertical jump development, and patellar tendinopathy rehab. Jake was a collegiate S&C coach for 7 years, with further experience in the private sector at Velocity Training Center.
He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Superior (2014) and his Masters from The College of St. Scholastica (2015).
His website: jackedathlete.com helps athletes gain copious amounts of muscle, jump higher, and rehab from jumper’s knee.
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