Ep 43 Pt. III | Dr. Trent Salo: Tendon Health

So if you're thinking about, you know, five to 10 years in the future, where do you think tendon training is going? What gets you really excited about the future of your work?

A better understanding of the biology, right? and the pathways of tendinopathy, I think will be critical.

And we had an orthopedic surgeon speak at our event last April on basically all these pathways that we can intervene, whether it's through a drug, whether it's something else that can stop tendinopathy in its tracks, if you will.

And so if we look at all of these other conditions, you know, cancer, et cetera, et cetera, which again, obviously important to pour dollars into and understand that to a high, high level.

But the progress that those other conditions have made outpaced the progress that we've made in the tendinopathy space significantly.

And so the one thing I'm excited about is just the more attention to the biology behind it and understanding the cellular mechanisms and interactions.

But the other side of it, I would say, is zooming in to the tissue level even more to get an understanding of what's actually going on at the tendon.

And not just making an assumption based on a GPS or an IMU in saying that they have high levels of accelerations or high speed running.

So therefore, the mechanical load on the Achilles tendon is really high.

I think we'll get to a point where we're actually measuring some of that like in vivo strain measurement.

And that's something that's really exciting because we're able to quantify some of the stressors and just help make more sense of maybe why injuries are popping up.

So those are two, I've got a list of things, man, but I would say those are two.

And again, just probably the third one would be, you know, better understanding of unhealthy tendons would be the third one where a lot of the literature has been in healthy tendons from a high magnitude or intensity of loading being required.

In unhealthy tendons, as we talked about, the mechanosensitivity is a bit lower.

And so maybe you don't need to load as heavy initially to get a good response, but we need more research on that.

So yeah, the biology, the direct measurement of the strain in vivo of the tendon, and then the better understanding of unhealthy tendons are the three areas I'm excited about.