Tendon Injuries

Your tendons connect your muscles to your bones allowing the transfer of force to your joints and in so keeping your upright and moving. Tendons can become damaged causing pain, inflammation and weakness. Tendonitis is when the tendon is inflamed and tends to be a more acute or sub-acute type of injury. A tendinopathy is a degeneration of the collagen protein that forms the tendon and usually falls into the category of a more chronic injury.

Some of the most common tendon injuries are RSI injuries to the elbow such as tennis and golfers elbow, Achilles, jumpers knee, hip and shoulder rotator cuff.

The 5 biggest causes of tendonitis and tendinopathies are:

1)    Overuse – too much stress and strain without enough recovery for your body to catch up will eventually lead to injury. Tendons are susceptible because they have a slower rate of healing than muscles so need longer to catch up.

2)    Structural distortion and misalignment – having joints that are locked up and out of alignment places unbalanced stresses on joints and loads up the tendons in ways that they are not optimally able to handle.

3)    Muscular imbalances – Muscular weakness, spasm or poor timing of contraction. When muscles don’t fire correctly both in timing and sequence extra stress is placed on your tendons.

4)    Poor balance – when your nervous system isn’t working optimally balance can suffer. When your balance is off, so are your joints and consequently the stress on tissue structures such as bones, cartilage, muscles, ligaments and tendons.

It is very important is for treatment to account for the underlying cause as this will change the approach. To treat tendon injuries without specific consideration for underlying causes leads to short-lived relief (often just the result of rest) and failed outcomes over the longer term. Things to consider include;

• Do you need to reconsider your recovery cycles from work and training

• Is the injury the result of a local problem or is the consequence of compensation for a more global issue?

• Is your nervous system irritated causing muscular imbalance?

• If your balance system is off what is causing that? Is it coming from poor joint function, sluggish vestibulospinal (inner ear mediated) reflexes or poor integration?

•    Is your nutritional status optimal for repair or do you have a pro-inflammatory diet making things worse?

These are just some of the questions we have to answer before proposing the right plan of care for you and the treatment of tendonitis. To just go and rub, needle and or medicate the sore spot is to overlook what could be the underlying cause of your problem and end up with a bigger problem down the track