How does that change when we think about optimizing for tendon health?

So I started as a strength and conditioning coach with the University of Michigan football team.

So it was all about kind of every time we got to get better.

And that was the whole idea.

And so part of, you know, as you go into a researcher, you come in with all of your implicit bias that you have from your background.

And so...

I had trained as an athlete and then I had worked with these elite athletes and everything was about pushing harder, pushing harder and getting more and progressing and having that progressive overload, as you just said.

But what what what is it other than my problems with my son explained? What is it about the tendon that stops listening after 10 minutes? And then is there like a refractory period where it's almost like I'm thinking of like the depolarization of an axon or something where it's like you have to wait for a certain amount of time before you can actually go back to it again? Is there something like that that's also present in the tendon?

Here's Keith and Luc.

So none of the things that we eat, if I eat a steak, that doesn't mean that I'm gonna build muscle because I take the muscle from the cow, and I've taken that chunk of muscle from the cow, and I'm gonna shove it into my quadricep muscle.

It means that I've broken it down into the building blocks, the amino acids, and then I've given those building blocks to the muscle that then can use them to build more muscle protein.

What do you take it for? Your skin looks lovely.

Oh, thank you.

Um, I, I don't take it for my skin because, um, yeah, there's less evidence for the skin.

There's better evidence for kind of joint health.

And so any time that I want to make sure that I give sufficient building blocks so that when my b- cells do need to make collagen, th- they have what they need in order to do that.

Here's Keith and Luc.

So none of the things that we eat, if I eat a steak, that doesn't mean that I'm gonna build muscle because I take the muscle from the cow, and I've taken that chunk of muscle from the cow, and I'm gonna shove it into my quadricep muscle.

It means that I've broken it down into the building blocks, the amino acids, and then I've given those building blocks to the muscle that then can use them to build more muscle protein.

What do you take it for? Your skin looks lovely.

Oh, thank you.

Um, I, I don't take it for my skin because, um, yeah, there's less evidence for the skin.

There's better evidence for kind of joint health.

And so any time that I want to make sure that I give sufficient building blocks so that when my b- cells do need to make collagen, th- they have what they need in order to do that.

How have they reacted to your research?

It's been, obviously there's a challenge with it.

Um, and we do this mostly, um, the groups that we reach out to are groups where it's mostly elite athletes.

Because what you have in the elite athlete is they wanna get back as soon as possible.

Now, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with RICE.

It will eventually get you better.

But when I, we do experiments in the lab where we actually can take little casts and we can put them on animals, and what we can do is in three days or seven days, I can have so much loss of collagen from the tendons and so much loss of force production from the muscle that it's gonna take me eight weeks to get back that same amount of strength within those systems.

Mm-hmm.

Whoa.

And it was just because everything was so loose that she could rotate her whole arm without, without changing the hand position.

Um, there's people...

Again, swan necking is a classic example.

When I f- I hold my fingers out, a lot of people, actually, their fingers go backwards a long way.

So, so these types of things are common.

The biggest health problem with this is that people, uh, because these connective tissues are really important for our blood vessels, um, the most common problem that happens with this is, is aortic aneurysms or aortic dissections.

Ah

And he told me that recently...

So I started getting a lot of emails from people asking me, "So I, you know, I inject BPC 157 into my tendons and, and they're feeling better.

Is, you know, this is a mar- magical thing." And I'm like, "Oh, well, that's really cool, so let's go test it."

And he told me that often it's pretty obvious if it's doing something.

If you wiggle it normally, you'll see it move a little bit.

If it's stronger, it'll stay nice and stiff.

If it's really weak, it'll flop around.

So you can see that these thing, these drugs or these treatments are really either having an effect on the tissue or they're not.

Yep

... complex one.

It's the mechanistic target of rapamycin.

So I'd been doing this.

I had a laboratory.

I was-- my first laboratory was in Scotland, and I was invited down by the English Institute of Sport to come to their cycling center, and they were like, "Okay, this is great.

We have these incredible athletes who are winning all kinds of gold medals, and we want them to get stronger." And so I go in there with my spiel about bigger muscles and all of this, and they're like, "Yeah, but we gotta carry that muscle mass." And I've got five years of data that shows me I'm getting these athletes stronger without making them any bigger, and in many cases, making them smaller.

When is it right to inhibit inflammation and when is it not?