My coach has educated me to the fact that I need to increase my tendon strength at the beginning of this training cycle. This is done in order to be able to handle the big weights, and therefore big stresses, that I will be encountering later in the year. Can anyone shed some light on a possible program that would help me?
Tendon strength and the AA phase is crap…training should be done year round and every year, and Type I collagen will increase from the metabolism of low intensity training, and the activation of heavy loads…don’t rush into max strength, but like speed, if you are training smart, you never leave it too far away to loose the previous years addaptations.
Davids there is some validity to what your coach said. And also to what clemson said. You cant go wrong with trying to strenghten your tendons do to the low impact of the exercise. One exercise you could do. Is to tighten your quads for 10 seconds then relax for ten seconds and repeat for 10 reps. If your using knee wraps you might want to let your body get used to the weight to strengthen tendons through squatting. At 80-85% you can put them on. Of course since we are sprinters why not have them on all the time. I learned that the hard way. I have never heard of the concept of strengthening your tendons year round through specific exercises. But then again who says it is wrong. I think the actual sprinting, squatting, and lifting will do this but why not be safe. I think however it should be best reserved for injury type situations.