Our Hinges Are Wearing Out

Hey {{first name | reader}},

It’s Tuesday, which means your weekly fitness check-in. Welcome to Week #31.

Last year, my progress toward my pull-up goal was stopped by pain in my right elbow. It got painful enough that I had to stop doing pull-ups altogether. Eight months later, the right elbow is better but not normal—and now the left elbow has joined the protest.

My progress has stalled. I can’t get past a maximum set of seven or eight. It’s time to reevaluate the goal and modify the training.

I’ve been comparing notes with friends, and the theme is consistent. One classmate is dealing with a shoulder injury that has made swimming painful. My sister has a hip issue. Several of us have quietly stopped running because of Achilles pain.

It’s one of those pesky aging things. Honestly, I’d rather push through it. But between the elbows and a deep dive into the research on aging tendons, I’ve learned that sometimes the specific goal matters less than preserving the ability to keep training.

The likely culprit here is a tendon, although elbows contain enough parts that diagnosing mine from the internet seems unwise. Tendons connect muscle to bone. Ligaments connect bone to bone. Both get less forgiving as we age, but the tendon is the more likely suspect in an overuse injury caused by repeatedly hauling my body toward a bar.

Tendons are trainable. They are also maddeningly slow.

Your muscles may be ready to add another pull-up. Your tendons are still processing the paperwork from the last one.

As we age, tendons can become stiffer, recover more slowly, and take longer to adapt to increases in load. Chronic tendon pain is not necessarily a pile of tiny tears that failed to heal. It is often a sign that the amount of work you are demanding has outpaced the tendon’s current ability to recover.

This is not the same thing as saying the tendon is doomed. It means that my preferred training strategy—add one pull-up every month until victory—is not the only party with a vote.

For women, perimenopause and menopause may add another layer. Estrogen is involved in collagen and connective-tissue health, although the exact relationship between hormone changes and individual tendon injuries is still being worked out. The research is more complicated than “menopause destroys your tendons,” but the sudden middle-aged chorus of Why does everything hurt now? is not entirely imaginary.

Basically, the hinges are not necessarily wearing out. They have started demanding regular maintenance, slower progress, and advance notice before any major renovations.

I’m not stopping training. I’m changing how I train.¹

The basic approach is to reduce the movement that is aggravating the tendon and then gradually rebuild its ability to handle load. Not zero load forever. Not grit your teeth and keep going. A deeply unsatisfying middle ground.

There are several ways to do that.

Isometric holds involve working against resistance without moving the joint. Hold a weight still in a challenging position and wait for time to lose all meaning.

Slow resistance work means doing the full movement at a deliberately controlled tempo—perhaps three seconds down and three seconds up instead of flinging the weight around and calling momentum a training method.

Eccentric loading emphasizes the lowering phase of a lift. It can be useful, but it is not the sole sacred path to tendon health. Regular controlled lifting, including both the raising and lowering phases, also counts.

The point is not to assemble the perfect collection of tendon exercises. The point is to give the tissue enough work to make it adapt, but not so much that it spends the next three days sending angry messages.

If an exercise is causing meaningful or worsening pain, stop forcing that exact version of it. Reduce the weight, repetitions, range of motion, or frequency. Substitute another movement for a while. Then build back slowly.

And if the pain is severe, persistent, accompanied by weakness or numbness, or has been hanging around for eight months and spreading to the other arm, see a professional.²

Question: Shouldn’t you just push through it? You’ve got a goal.

Answer: No. And I say that as someone who was raised by a coach who thought otherwise.

Bubba, my high school track coach, had a rule: if it’s not bleeding or broken, you run through it.

I believed that for a long time, and it cost me—two Achilles ruptures, a knee that still complains, and a hip that has opinions.

Tendons do not work on the same schedule as muscles. Your muscles can feel ready to go again while the tendon is still in the back office, surrounded by forms.

Pushing through steadily worsening pain does not make the tendon more resilient. Sometimes it simply gives irritated tissue another helping of the exact load it is already failing to tolerate.

So: not pushing through. Adjusting the exercises, adjusting the load, and letting ten pull-ups become a goal with a longer runway.

Myth: Stretching will relieve tendon pain.

Reality: Not necessarily—and sometimes it makes things worse.

Stretching can help when a muscle is tight or limited mobility is contributing to a movement problem. But tendon pain is not automatically a flexibility problem.

Depending on which tendon is irritated and where, stretching may pull harder on it or press it against a nearby bone. If the tendon is already cranky, more pulling is not always the peace offering it appears to be.

Controlled strength work generally does more to rebuild a tendon’s capacity than repeatedly trying to lengthen it.

Stretch the muscle when the muscle needs mobility. Load the tendon when the tendon needs capacity. They are not the same job.³

You can’t eat your way out of an overloaded tendon. This is unfortunate, because eating is significantly easier than rehabilitation.

You can, however, give your body enough protein and energy to support the slow work of repair. Beans qualify. They are inexpensive, filling, protein-rich, high in fiber, and produced in quantities that suggest you are either feeding a large family or have badly misunderstood how dried beans work.

Here’s my pot of red beans. Swap in any bean you like.

Ingredients

8 oz dried red beans, soaked overnight
1 small onion, finely chopped
4 ribs celery, finely chopped
1 green bell pepper, finely chopped
1–2 Scotch bonnet peppers, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp oregano
1 whole smoked turkey wing
Water or stock
Salt and pepper to taste

Rinse the soaked beans.

Sauté the onion, celery, bell pepper, and Scotch bonnet until soft and fragrant. Add the garlic and sauté for another minute.

Add the oregano, beans, turkey wing, and enough water or stock to just cover everything.

Instant Pot: Cook at high pressure for 45 minutes, then allow a natural release for 15 minutes.

No Instant Pot: Bring everything to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer for 90 minutes to two hours.

The beans are done when they are soft but not mushy. Remove the turkey wing, pull off the meat, chop it, and stir it back into the pot. Add salt and pepper to taste.

There will be leftovers. Invite bean people over, freeze some, or accept that beans are now your personality for the week.⁴

If you want the dense, clinical version of everything above—how tendons age, why they heal more slowly, and what researchers currently think might help—this review paper covers it.

It is not a light read, but it is the actual science underneath a topic most fitness content reduces to stretch more, rest forever, or purchase this powder.

“Effect of Aging on Tendon Biology, Biomechanics and Implications for Treatment Approaches”

Pick one lift you already do comfortably and slow down the lowering phase.

Use a weight you can control. Take three full seconds on the way down. Do two or three sets without training to failure.

A calf raise, squat, dumbbell curl, or chest press will work. The specific exercise matters less than the control.

It should feel deliberate and challenging. It should not produce sharp pain or leave the area substantially worse the following day.

Next-day pain is not the tendon congratulating you. It may simply be the tendon asking why you ignored the assignment.

Stay strong,
{{first name | reader}}

P.S. The pull-ups aren’t cancelled. They’re just on a longer timeline than Bubba would have approved of.