How strong are tendons? How about ligaments?

[D_Glenn]

Question for any fluent chinese: I figured there would be a word for fascia, I think it is 腠 cou4. Would that be correct?


.

[somatai]

"Strangely none of this seems to work very well unless you have a basic level of fitness first."

this i agree with, there has to be enough "raw material" to forge.....it almost seems like alot of my training experience has been just amassing enough "energy" to begin to shape, direct and understand so as to change my physical being.....there is a requisite degree of strength or physicality required to make much of this happen in my experience......that is the "gung fu" or hard work needed

[everything]

I appreciate the "just do it, don't worry about the science" type of practical advice.

But there is no point in my mind in altogether dismissing "science" because it can't yet explain something people here experience and "know" to be true. Ultimately it will get closer and is interesting and helpful. The probability of someone attaining the mastery of Yang Lu Chan and then passing on that skill to great numbers of people is simply not as high as the probability of a great many of us understanding (and possibly contributing to) the intellectual knowledge that can help move things forward for greater numbers of students in general. Most people won't make it to be an elite athlete but elite athletes and below benefit from trainers who've studied the latest findings from researchers and figured out to apply them. A lot of trainers couldn't make it to the elite level but figured out a way to help others do so. A lot of researchers probably couldn't make it to the level those trainers did but moved the overall ball a lot farther by doing research. I don't see the point of being anti-intellectual from a societal contribution point of view. I do see it from a practical "just do it" training point of view.

Still, I do believe when Dan says that interest starts to fall off because the benefits take longer than is needed in an athletic program but in general, over the long term, I'd still give "science" a chance to contribute something positive from its pov. Further, the PT's, scientists, pseudoscientists, and others here can possibly bring these lenses closer together over time and that is surely helpful. I know someone will say "the map is not the territory" but more maps can't be bad.

[everything]

Chris, cdobe, Brady, others - do you think plyometrics training would interfere with or complement zhan zhuang training? something else?

[Interloper]

RE: Fascia -- A related discussion going on, on an osteopathy board:

http://www.sacralmusings.com/forum/topi ... the-joints

Also, if you poke around on the 'net you might find a copy of a paper that was presented at a conference on fascia held in Cambridge, Mass. a few years ago. It addressed the discovery (within fascia) of the same kind of nerve cell found in muscle tissue that permits it to expand and contract. Some of the posters on the above discussion board make reference to that finding. It seems to be a first step in Western science to make solid findings on something that many people have known physically and intuitively for perhaps millennia.

[Chris McKinley]

everything,

RE: "do you think plyometrics training would interfere with or complement zhan zhuang training?". It would likely have no truly significant effect on it. Plyometrics, while it does appear to increase overall motor nerve activation thresholds, and arguably motor nerve myelination, it most directly affects the white fast-twitch fibers, the kind not really involved in zhan zhuang until the red slow-twitch fibers (responsible for endurance capacity for activities such as zhan zhuang) are momentarily fatigued, and the body is forced to try recruiting the fast-twitch fibers to maintain the load.

To that end, it's perhaps plausible that that recruitment effort might be affected by the effects of plyometric exercise, but it's not clear to me whether that effect would be a) positive due to the facilitated motor unit activation among fast-twitch fibers, making them easier to recruit, or b) negative in that the facilitation provided occurs in total fashion, activating all of the available fast-twitch fibers simultaneously. The latter option would have the result that, once the slow-twitch fibers were exhausted, the fast-twitch fibers might be recruited all at once, providing even stronger jerking and spasmodic activation of the remaining fibers than usually happens. I simply don't know. Either way, though, the effect would likely not be very dramatic, since the nervous system does have some redundancy built in to avoid just such unproductive recruitment/movement.

[Brady]

How did this get to be a thread on plyometrics? They don't even matter in this discussion. Neither does the Golgi Tendon apparatus. Cdobe, the golgi tendon organs have little to do with properly done plyo's. They are primarily and almost completely an injury prevention mechanism. Muscle spindles are another story.

But I mean, in the end, who cares? This is a fight just to fight. I'm more interested in concepts like long term potentiation, fascial remodeling in highly trained individuals, neural plasticity and the like, than a little misunderstood specialty organ. This conversation went from interesting to idle bickering quickly.

[cdobe]

Brady,
I for one am not fighting for fighting's sake. But this is exactly the impression he wants to convey. He could have just answered my question, but he chose to attack me.
The Golgi tendon organ is relevant to thread, since this thread is in part about tendons: "How strong are tendons? How about ligaments?"

To my understanding, muscle spindles and the tendon organs work very closely together and complement each other. I don't see how you can seperate the effects of muscle spindles and GTOs, they both get excited when a muscle gets strongly stretched.

CD

How did this get to be a thread on plyometrics? They don't even matter in this discussion. Neither does the Golgi Tendon apparatus. Cdobe, the golgi tendon organs have little to do with properly done plyo's. They are primarily and almost completely an injury prevention mechanism. Muscle spindles are another story.

But I mean, in the end, who cares? This is a fight just to fight. I'm more interested in concepts like long term potentiation, fascial remodeling in highly trained individuals, neural plasticity and the like, than a little misunderstood specialty organ. This conversation went from interesting to idle bickering quickly.

[Bodywork]

Brady,
I for one am not fighting for fighting's sake. But this is exactly the impression he wants to convey. He could have just answered my question, but he chose to attack me.
The Golgi tendon organ is relevant to thread, since this thread is in part about tendons: "How strong are tendons? How about ligaments?"

To my understanding, muscle spindles and the tendon organs work very closely together and complement each other. I don't see how you can seperate the effects of muscle spindles and GTOs, they both get excited when a muscle gets strongly stretched.

Where it becomes irrelevent -IME- is that no where are we discussing over stretching anything. Thus the discussion of spindles and GTO's are not involved in the discussion. For my purposes you all might as well be discussing how high reps / low weight VS low reps / high weight effect muscle developement....in internal training...yawn.

More on topic would be some of your research into the newer discovery of activating the fascia and tendons not in a way done through normal loads
Even more on topic would be how that is accomplished in internal training.
More, more, and even more...on topic would be why, where, and how, that is done; both traditionally and if it it is even possible with western methods?
Then who we can go feel and train with who thinks they have done so.

[eddie mush]

Question for any fluent chinese: I figured there would be a word for fascia, I think it is 腠 cou4. Would that be correct?


.

don't know how fluent I am but we usually say:
jin1 mo2 筋膜

Mush

[eddie mush]

Hi Tom!

I have never heard about the scandinavian link to the Mongol/Chinese before but it sure sounds interesting.
Here in China I'm often amazed by the amount of knowledge the chinese have about my small country Denmark. They all know the fairytales of our beloved writer Hans Christian Andersen, that we still are a kingdom and like the british not using €'s etc.
May I have your friends name? His books sound like a good read...

Mush

[zenshiite]

There was a movie not so long ago that melded Chinese and Swede/Norse stories via the Kalavala.

[Ian]

The Kalevala is Finnish.

The Norse mythologies, preserved in texts like the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, are mostly Icelandic.

The stories are quite different.

[Chanchu]

There seems to have been a lot of research done on the function of tendons in recent years. In the past only the function of attaching muscle to bone was cited.

Tendon storage of energy, transfer of rotary forces, and tendon elasticity were not talked about much- if at all. ww have some MD's PT's other medical professionals and so on- here on the "flower who may not be named."
So what does the current research say about the effects of tendon in force generation? What does it say about tendon training?. Just reading some new medical article abstracts on line since seeing this thread - looks interesting.

Would be a good idea for a article by someone with a medical/physiology back ground. "Effects of tendons in force generation in Tai Chi". Anyone know of such a article of worth?

"The high resilience of tendon means that it can serve as an effective biological spring. "

http://www.springerlink.com/content/u7j3718q734n71h5/

Collagen
Structure and Mechanics
10.1007/978-0-387-73906-9_10
Peter Fratzl
10. Tendons and Ligaments: Structure, Mechanical Behavior and Biological Function

A.A. Biewener
Abstract
The non-linear viscoelasticity of tendons and ligaments, for which much of their mechanical behavior reflects the properties of their collagen I fibrils, is well suited to absorbing and returning energy associated with the transmission of tensile forces across joints of the body. The high resilience of tendon means that it can serve as an effective biological spring. At the same time, the flexibility of tendons and ligaments allows them to accommodate a wide range of joint movement (or, in the case of ligaments, to restrict movement within a certain range). The high strength of tendons and ligaments also provides considerable weight savings, but this is traded off against the ability to control position and movements of the musculoskeletal system. Tendon and ligament compliance allows elastic energy to be stored and returned to offset energy fluctuations of the body’s center of mass during locomotion, conserving muscle work and reducing the metabolic energy cost of locomotor movement. Tendon architecture greatly affects the storage and recovery of elastic strain energy, with long, thin tendons favoring greater strain energy/volume (and weight) of the tendon. It is likely that other elastic elements, such as muscle aponeuroses, also contribute significant energy savings. Tendon compliance may also reduce the cost of muscle contraction, by reducing a muscle’s contractile velocity and length change for a given movement, as well as increasing the power output of muscle–tendon units that is key to rapid acceleration and jumping performance. This power enhancement requires a temporal decoupling of muscle work to stretch the tendon from the subsequent more rapid release of elastic strain energy from the tendon. This decoupling may be achieved by changes in inertia and mechanical advantage in vertebrates, but is facilitated by catch mechanisms in invertebrate jumpers. Although it is critical that tendons and ligaments have sufficient strength and an adequate safety factor to limit the risk of failure, tendons are likely subject to damage during their use, which favors a greater safety factor. In addition, because tendon compliance impedes position control, the thickness of many tendons suggests that having sufficient stiffness, rather than strength, is a key structural requirement. Indeed, the majority of tendons that have been studied to date appear to operate at lower stresses and strains, have larger safety factors, and are stiffer, compared with “high-stress” tendons of animals specialized for elastic energy savings.
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[everything]

Sorry for the slight detour on the thread, folks. I did have some beef tendon (pho) tonight. Didn't strengthen my own tendons at all but damn it was good.

Mmm, I do love beef tendon pho.