Here is how you can reverse training-related injuries like tendonitis, muscle strains, and joint pain without warm-ups, stretching, or prehab, and while training at maximum intensity to build strength, muscle mass, mobility, and a great physique as fast as possible.
Injury – A Necessary Part of Strength Gain?
In the past, I’ve dealt with tendonitis, strains, and soreness as a result of training. It was at this period of my life, in my early training career, where I wasn’t even that strong. I was still struggling with basic intermediate movements, and my physique wasn’t really that impressive. Yet, I still had to navigate around these injury issues, take time off, and regress as a result of these things happening.
I did everything I could to try and prevent it. I did prehab work, mobility training, and had a whole warm-up routine before my strength training, which I now think is hilarious. I spent so much time on the bulletproofing work to try and keep my body healthy. It just didn’t work.
Since then, I have dropped all of that sort of stuff. I’ve cut my training back to only maximum intensity strength work, which takes me less than 40 minutes a week. It’s my entire training routine. In the time since that change, I’ve gained stupid amounts of strength and muscle mass. My physique has transformed, and in doing this, I’ve actually reversed all those issues: tendonitis gone, joint pains gone, my body feels incredible all the time, and I never have issues with this sort of thing. I know how to fix it and eliminate it from my life without compromising my training or regressing with my strength.
The best part is, it’s not just me. My students make the best strength and muscle gains in their lives, and they find that when they adopt this method we use, all their niggling pains and injuries tend to disappear. They gain full functional use of their bodies.
There is a method to this, and it’s really not that complicated once you understand the basic human physiology underlying these processes. So, that’s what I’ll explain now. Here’s how we do it.
The Two Tissue Types
There are basically two elements at play here. On one hand, you’ve got connective tissue—your tendons, ligaments, the things connecting your muscles to your joints and holding your joints together. Then, you’ve got your muscles, the things that we want to stimulate to grow in order to build strength, mobility, and a better-looking physique.
Connective Tissue
Connective tissue is really slow to recover from damage compared to muscle tissue. But the thing is, it can withstand far higher forces than our muscles are capable of producing. Connective tissue gets damaged by not having enough recovery in a week, not enough rest time compared to the use we demand of it throughout the week.
So in order to look after our connective tissue, we want as little training volume in our week as possible. However, it doesn’t really matter how intense that volume is, how heavy it is, because connective tissue doesn’t really care about force. It can withstand way more force than our muscles can even produce at their maximum effort.
Muscle Tissue
That is the key, because on the flip side, muscle mass is stimulated to grow by intensity. Muscle gain happens in response to mechanical tension, which is when it exerts force at the maximum threshold it is capable of. When we lift a load that is as heavy as we can possibly lift, it very quickly stimulates our muscles to grow, get stronger, and get bigger.
The Riskiest Type of Training For Injury
With that in mind, let’s consider the types of training we can do. If we do training that’s sub-maximal intensity—anything less than as heavy as we can go at any given point in time—that training is, by definition, under-stimulating muscle growth compared to what it could be if it were heavier. This means slower or no muscle and strength gain, but it’s still taxing connective tissue, still having a damaging effect on tendons, while being less effective at getting the result that we want.
Because it’s less effective at stimulating muscle growth and strength gain, we need more of that training to get the result that we want. We need to do much more volume in the week to have a chance of that training being effective, which means we now put our connective tissue under much more stress for the week and give it less chance to recover. This puts us at higher risk of things like tendonitis, strains, and joint pain, while still not necessarily being productive for making gains.
Volume that’s low intensity is just less effective. We know that mechanical tension is the driver for muscle and strength gain—it’s very well documented by this point. Low-intensity training means we need to do more training to have a chance of being effective, which means more stress on connective tissue with less time to recover, which means more risk of injury without necessarily better gains.
You Can’t Warmup Your Way Out Of Damaging Training
Warm-ups will not mitigate this. Stretching will not mitigate this. We are talking about physical damage to that connective tissue as an inherent result of training. Any load-bearing activity is going to cause that, and the only possible solution to that damage is time—to allow your body to rest, recover, and heal.
A Smarter Approach To Strength Training
So, what’s the solution? How do we get the benefits of strength training while minimising the downsides to our tendons and other connective tissue? It’s very straightforward. We use the minimum possible training volume and make every single bit of that volume as effective as possible for stimulating strength and muscle gain.
How do we do that? Maximum intensity. We only ever train at maximum possible intensity. We keep every single centimetre of every rep that we do at failure, or just below, all the way up through the concentric, and we go above failure for every single centimetre of the eccentric. We force ourselves down through the negatives while we try and push back up. This way, we optimise gains in strength, muscle, and mobility while minimising stress on connective tissue as much as possible.
This single principle alone is responsible for all my progress over the last five or six years, despite training for 40 minutes a week, despite never warming up, and has allowed me to stay injury-free for that entire period while training stupidly heavy and pushing my strength to genuinely advanced levels.
How To Reverse Training-Related Injury
To make this really simple: If you want to avoid and reverse injury, do not avoid intensity with your strength training. That very act is going to compromise you, hold you back from progress, and increase your risk of injury. Avoid wasting time on junk volume that damages your connective tissue, doesn’t stimulate muscle growth, and then requires you to do stacks of volume every week because your muscles are under-stimulated, recover quickly, and are craving more, while your tendons are screaming for a rest.
Of course, the side benefit is that when you get this right, your training only needs to take 40 minutes a week!
The Effective Work Is The Safe Work
I get asked all the time: Will intense training hurt me? Doesn’t it put me at risk of injury? I’m older; shouldn’t I be worried about doing intense training? No, no, no, no, no. This holds so many people back from ever making the progress they want, and it puts people in the position of hurting themselves.
I hope this clarifies why you do not need to avoid proper training but seek it out, and your body will be in a much better position, both in your strength, mobility, and how you look, but also in how you feel. And I think that’s maybe the best part of this minimalist, max-intensity approach.