Okay. I’m sitting here with Taylor Starch. We had a talk maybe a week or two ago. I just, was, have seen you post Achilles tendon stuff on social media and I was like, I wanna chat with you about tendons and like kind of an unexpected talk for me. Cause you’ve, I didn’t know you’ve dug so deep into these things. So tell everyone who you are.
Taylor Starch (00:22)
Yeah, so what’s up everyone? For those who don’t know, my name is Taylor. Most people just call me Starch. Been in kind of the strength and conditioning industry for a little bit now. So I’ve been around long enough to seem like I know everything, but we know how it works. The more you know, the less you feel like you know. So I’ve been around for about 15 years. I’m an endurance athlete by nature. So I started off racing and training like with USA Cycling back in the day.
Technically, I’m a strength coach by profession, but I’ve got a cooler name on LinkedIn. It’s called human performance subject matter expert, which makes me sound like So much cooler on and for the latter part of the past decade. I’ve been working alongside the Department of Defense on Air Force special warfare kind of helping them build their human performance program strength and conditioning on And currently I am a washed up endurance athlete who likes to act like I can run ultra marathons
I love mountain biking, all that stuff. Big dude, but also I’m in gym around at heart, baby. There’s nothing better than going and switching off your brain and getting mindless bro pumps. So when it comes to strength and conditioning, I love it all. I love endurance training. I love mobility, kettlebells, barbells, you name it. And I’ve been lucky to have been doing this for almost 20 years now.
Jake (01:40)
Okay, my I feel like anyone who gets obsessed with tendons probably does it because either they’ve had injuries or people they work with are just have a ton of injuries so what’s your story why why’d you start looking into it?
Taylor Starch (01:54)
Yeah, I
think like anything, you go to school and then you’re kind of like, okay, patellar tendon, Achilles tendon, IT band, you learn the names of them and then you don’t really care about them at all. And then you go do your thing, you train your athletes. And then as you start training people, you realize that almost everyone you train is in a textbook. They’re a disaster. It’s like every single person, know, especially I work with a lot of guys and gals in the military, a lot of SF dudes, operators.
And so you’re picturing you’re gonna get this like Navy SEAL who is this just like unstoppable force and they are. But they also have patellar tendinopathy, Achilles issues. They’ve had it for seven years. And then all of a sudden you run into, wait, like, and then you have to start learning how, like, how do I even deal with this? And you know, like 20 years ago, we didn’t really know much about tendons. mean, back in the day we had that good old Alf, what is it, the Alfreson protocol where, you know,
throw on a backpack and do like a hundred eccentric reps every day, even to the point of like excruciating pain. But we didn’t really know much. Fortunately nowadays, like we actually have a growing like body of literature and evidence and people are putting out so much good stuff about tendons. But I still think that it’s kind of one of those situations when you’re a strength coach, when you’re an athlete. So I’m an endurance athlete myself. I love doing ultra marathons here in the Arizona. So I run the green Canyon all the time.
And you don’t really care about it until it starts hurting on yourself. And especially once starts hurting to the point where you do your normal bag of tricks and it doesn’t work, right? And that’s when you realize that we know a lot of stuff, especially in 2025, right? But we don’t understand most of the things we know. And then, and then you realize not only do I not understand the things I think I know, I don’t really have the wisdom to apply them to either myself or my clients. So I had tons of athletes, um,
runners, I work primarily with runners and endurance athletes, triathletes, guys going into like Green Beret, PJ, Seal and stuff like that. So dealing with those people, you start to be like, okay, I don’t know my stuff, or at least I don’t understand the stuff I know. And then when I started getting into ultra marathons and trail running, you you just start running like crazy. And I was a good endurance athlete, I got the opportunity to train with USA Cycling. So
My thought process is I’m a beast endurance athlete. I should just be able to run like crazy. Well, I was so ignorant and naive that when I started doing all these ultra marathons, trail runs, sparring races, that my Achilles started blowing up. And I’m sitting there like, well, what the heck? I’ve got good endurance, right? This makes no sense. And then you start realizing that when it comes to the human body, there’s different tissues and they have different issues and different tissues need different solutions. And I think it’s one of those things where we just think of like,
Train your calves, get them stronger, right? That’s not wrong, but even when it comes to like the Achilles tendon, same thing. you want a strong Achilles. What does that mean? I mean, Kobe was the goat, he was the mamba and he blew out his Achilles. like, and you don’t think he knew how to go about business. So you start diving into it you start realizing, wait, there’s different tissues in the body. They respond to different things. They like different things. They prefer different things.
And so that’s how I got into like tendons is through, I started getting some wicked, um, insertional Achilles tendonitis because when you’re running uphill at like, you know, even like 7 % incline is going to increase the strain on the Achilles like 55%. I think it is, which is, it doesn’t even sound real when you hear that, like that a 7 % incline increases strain on the Achilles like 55%. And then, you know, a lot of times in trail running, you’re running at 25, 30, 35%. So I started blowing up.
my Achilles and then started diving into it and then realized I knew a lot of things about tendons, but I didn’t understand them. And that’s kind of how my journey into tendons started was blowing up my own Achilles. That’s the best way to do it. Right. And then almost every runner you deal with is dealing with primarily tendon issues since running is such a store and release activity. Right. If you’re running on the flat, about 80 to 85 % of that’s coming from tendons. So if you start working with runners,
Very quickly you realize most runners are getting connective tissue injuries or reactive strength injuries and that forces you to see if you actually know your stuff, which I didn’t at the time and I’m slowly learning year by year.
Jake (06:30)
Okay, we were talking before we got on here you were talking about well variability saying everything everything’s coming back to variability You have this case of like a trail runner versus like a road runner One has variability one doesn’t If they both acquire injuries, are you looking at them any differently if it’s like a tendon injury?
Taylor Starch (06:49)
Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. So
I think that when we think about just tendons or just even structures, we think about one thing, right? Similar like, someone’s glutes are weak and we treat the glute as if it’s one thing. Same thing with the Achilles tendon. Like for years, you just think Achilles tendon. Then all of you look into the research, like some of the cadaver dissections, you’re like, wait a second. The Achilles is not one thing. It’s a lot of things. You have different sub tendons.
And those different subtendons go to different parts of the lateral gastroc, which is the outside calf, the medial gastroc, which is inside calf, and the soleus, or if I want to sound super intelligent, the soleus. I always love when our friends across the pond say soleus. It makes us sound so lame here in the States. And then you start thinking about this and you start looking into fascicles and all that and connective tissue and tapered end fibers and all the
you start realizing human body is far more complex than we ever can imagine. Like it’s scary how complex it is. But at a simple nature, connective tissue has these behaviors. And one of the behaviors of connective tissue is that it’s non-uniform, which means that when we impart force into connective tissue, right? And tendon is just thicker connective tissue and there’s connective tissue everywhere, not just in tendon. So back in the day, right? You pulled out your anatomy book, you had the bone, you have this white tendon, then you have the muscle.
Then you have the white tendon and then you have the bone and for years that’s the knowledge I had of connective tissue. But then you realize, wait a second, that connective tissue isn’t just near the bone. It goes into the muscle. It surrounds it and encapsulates it. It holds the muscle fibers. It permeates. It’s this entire web. And I’m not talking like the whole cult functional patterns like fascial web or whatever. I’m talking there’s legitimate connective tissue that runs some of it runs partial length.
So it doesn’t run the entire length of the muscle fiber. Some of it does. So what is that telling us? That when we put force into tissue, into muscle, that it’s non-uniform, which means it gets dispersed and spread out, which is why we’re able to do all the amazing things we can do, right? If force was uniform, meaning it went in one direction, one way all the time, we’d get injured all the time. And that’s the interesting thing. What we see is when people damage tendons, that there’s less variability.
Right? So when it comes to variability of something like the Achilles tendon, in a nutshell, there’s three subtendons of the soleus lateral gastric than that. But the thing I didn’t realize is that I had trouble understanding this. Like they talk about in the research how the Achilles tendon will spiral and turn like 90 degrees that that creates like a loaded spring. And that allows force to get distributed spread out, which allows us to dissipate heat, which is
The ultimate job of tendons and connective tissue is to dissipate heat, right? It’s to absorb that force. So the interesting thing is if you think about it, when someone who’s running on the road, are trying, they’re running the same way in the same pattern, assuming they’re running on the flats, right? So the road runner is going to get incredibly efficient in certain lines of that connective tissue in those tendons. Because remember a tendon doesn’t just have one line of, of
connective tissue. It’s got thousands of lines and obviously we can simplify and say, well, there’s some lateral stuff, there’s some medial stuff, there’s all that. But for instance, I didn’t understand that when it comes to like the Achilles tendon that it does basically a 90 degree spiral, which means that, I had trouble understanding this, but if we’re talking about the left Achilles tendon, that if you picture that there’s a circle with two dots and the dot at nine o’clock is the lateral gastroc.
When if you turn that right 90 degrees, then the lateral gastroc is going to end up at a 12 o’clock, which is the front, which is the anterior. So what does that mean? That means that just because you’re hitting the ground or you’re doing an ISO doesn’t mean you’re uniformly loading, stressing or straining every line of connective tissue or tendon. So why we tend to see road runners blow up in certain ways. And I think that we get issues is because
They have a lack of variability of loading different areas of the tendon. And it’s backwards of what we think, right? We think that the areas that get the load are gonna blow up and the areas that don’t get load are gonna not. And the weird thing about it is, is we know tendons need strain to gain. So like in the Achilles, right? That spiral is going to mean that the anterior fibers which sit on the front of the calcaneus are not getting that much load compared to the back stuff.
So it’s actually the fibers that aren’t getting enough load and are getting deprived of stress that are going to not be able to adapt. So what does that mean? That variability is crazy important when we’re doing our sport, right? So we know that people are more skilled and that are going to have better longevity or better survivability when it comes to like degradation of tendons and connective tissue need variability.
Sport is going to naturally degrade tendons because you have to get good at it and to get good at it, you need to do the same thing over and over again. So I think what I said in way too many words is that we have to appreciate that there are many lines of tissue and just because you do an ISO in one position doesn’t mean you’re getting all the tissues and just because you run in the same direction doesn’t mean everything’s getting uniform loading or stronger, faster, better.
Jake (12:31)
Yeah, so in our conversation a couple weeks ago, you were talking about you doing calf raises. I think, don’t know, isometric calf raises and it’s this whole talk of the subtendons and if that, it’s an insertional problem, it’s like the underside of the Achilles that is kind of getting that pathology and that’s lining up with the lateral gastroc, right? And then you were kind of doing calf raises in a, yeah, can you talk about kind of your experience and like how weak you were trying to hit this maybe area of
Taylor Starch (12:52)
Yeah, yeah.
Jake (13:01)
depend.
Taylor Starch (13:02)
Yeah,
I think that’s where it became real to me because I think everyone gets that, okay, we know that like, okay, I’ve got a tendon that’s not doing well, spam it with ISOs, drown it with ISOs, right? 100%. But then I think that’s where people just kind of do that. And then they do their three to four sets of 30 to 45 seconds. But we have to remember,
that just because you get strong or train or strain a tendon in one position, that means you hit certain fibers, fascicles and tendons, right? Because there’s the tendons that connect all the fascicles and subtendons within the tendon, right? And we know some of them go the whole length, some of them don’t. So what I’m saying is we need to make sure that we hit the different aspects of the tendon. So here’s a great example is when we’re doing ISOs,
I think that 99 % of people that do an isometric do it the same way every single time. It’s not wrong. But what I started doing was I started saying, okay, well, I almost want to think of it like floors of a hotel, right? If I have a 10 story hotel and I go to the third floor and I clean up all the rooms, technically the hotel is getting cleaner, but all those other floors need attention, right? So just because I cleaned the third floor doesn’t mean I cleaned the fourth or the fifth or the sixth.
I have to go to that specific floor and do specific work to make that better. Now I could argue and say my hotel is less messy, but then of the day, those other areas have been neglected. So what I started realizing was that we have these different lines of the tendon in connective tissue. And whenever I change the angle to a certain degree, obviously there’s carry over a little bit, you’re going to.
Number one, expose lines of the tendon connective tissue that aren’t getting strained because either you have a repetitive motion like running or that we know that the strong gets stronger and the weak gets weaker, right? That’s the stress shielding effect that we know tendons in the, the nervous system is the great governor, right, of protecting us. It cares about survivability, right? Surviving and thriving. And to do that, it’s gonna stress shield.
those injured areas or those areas that aren’t able to transmit force appropriately. So what I started doing was I started saying, wait a second, why am I just training in one position in one way? Because just because you’re strong somewhere doesn’t mean you’re strong everywhere. And the way I think of it like, is imagine you had a castle, like I’m thinking like, what’s a like the kingdom of heaven, right? You’ve got Jerusalem, you’ve got the front gate and you’ve got all your guards and knights on the front gate.
And you’re like, I dare you to come through the front gate because you’ve got lots of strength to protect you there. Then all of they’re like, wait a second, no one’s guarding that lateral outside gate there, right? There’s not much there. Let’s attack there. So now think of that like your ISOs and your connective tissue training. Just because you’re slamming ISOs here and getting stronger, faster, better, that’s fricking amazing. Pain might be coming down. You might be coming awesome.
Then all of sudden now we change and we add a 30 degree maybe a tibial external rotation or 30 degree internal rotation. Now we’ve changed which fibers are at length and which fibers aren’t at length and which, so we’ve completely changed which fibers are experiencing more length and more strain. Then all of sudden it’s like, oh, you might be able to do 150 pounds straight on. You go at tibial external rotation, done so. And then you realize, wait a second, I’ve been putting all my army
All my nights, all my warriors at the front gate, in the rear gate, the left gate, the right gate was completely exposed and vulnerable, right? And that’s where I think we get caught up in just training these linear lines, these positions, and it’s not wrong. But I’m talking like, this is the diversity that we need in our training to understand that like floors of a hotel, don’t just clean the third floor and call it good.
Right? You need to go to every floor like motherfucking John Wick and clear each one of those floors out, right? Think of like a John Wick sequence where he starts at the top floor, fights his way to the next floor, fights his way to the next floor, fights his way to the next floor. That’s a dumb example. But if you think of John Wick just tearing through people in a hotel, that’s what we need to do in our connective tissue training where we’re trying to hit different levels of the connective tissue, because each one might present different issues or have different lengths. And so now think,
Okay, maybe we do isos with our toe forward. Now we do them toe out, toe in. And the bodybuilders knew that instinctively back in the day that, well, we should go toe out and toe in to hit different parts of the muscle. So bodybuilders like Schwarzenegger, Tom Platts, all of them understood that from building the muscle. I think we need to steal that concept in terms of building the tendon and building the connective tissue that we need to change the angle. So maybe that we do isos where you start with your foot under your hip.
And then each week instead of adding load you move your leg further back into a full step because we know tendons need what more strain to gain and just because I’m strong in one position doesn’t mean I’m stronger than that. So I’m not saying that if we do enough isos we can prevent the Aaron Rodgers or anything like that or the Kirk Cousins but show me a single person who is doing isos that week by week is
putting their leg further behind them or now they’re putting it on a slant board and further behind them or now they’re putting on a slant board and adding a bit of eversion to change the angle. I don’t see it anywhere and I think that’s because we know that isos work but we don’t understand isos and we don’t understand connective tissue training because we get caught up training the same positions over and over again and just like if you were guarding a castle, it doesn’t matter how many dudes are
people you have at the front gate, the left, if the back one’s exposed, you’re going to get attacked and overwhelmed there.
Jake (19:04)
So if we take it exactly like five sets of 45 seconds, know, let’s say for tendon rehab, all the same angle, slight dorsiflexion, toe straight, whatever, how would you do it differently? Or how have you been doing it differently? I guess you covered it there, the exact, the exact.
Taylor Starch (19:23)
Yeah, think, well, I think
there are so many ways. I mean, the research is kind of, we start to think that we know the answer, right? Where it’s like, okay, tendons need heavy, heavy loads, right? So something maybe like the Berlin Protocol or something like that, where it almost feels like you’re gonna snap city the tendon. Then all of sudden we see some of the older literature. I think it was, I might be pronouncing this wrong, like Headinger, Headinger.
It’s from like the 60s. It’s like they did like this research like we all think that stuff is new right that we’re like my gosh this we’re in like we’re in the age of isos and I love it dude Isos are the best but it’s like kind of like lord of the rings like you know like they’re like the age of the orc is upon us like We are in the age of isos and I couldn’t be more thrilled. but man, I got derailed there.
Jake (20:18)
Yeah, I was saying the
exact, how you’re, I guess based on the research, know, like 5-7-45 or whatever it is, how are you,
Taylor Starch (20:22)
Yeah, yeah, so even back,
yeah, even back like 50 years ago, right? They looked at like, what was the minimal effective dose for like connective tissue tendon? And they showed that you could go as low as like 30 % of NVC, right? Now they had the sweep spot as like 60 to 80%, right? And I know a lot of people like Alex Netera or Netera out of Australia would say that 80 % represents about a 30 second.
Right duration iso. I know that people are going to argue about the numbers. I think that’s pointless. So a way that I think about it is almost I steal a concept from endurance training is I think we get caught up in saying, should I do my isos heavy for three to five seconds for cluster sets? Should I do two minute isos? Obviously we know that certain things work well. Obviously if someone’s in pain versus that, but I like to think of two things when it comes to connective tissue is low intensity.
durability and high intensity repeatability. Now that’s a concept from the world of endurance training when it comes to cardio. And I actually think it applies decently well to preparing connective tissue. So let’s look at the first one, low intensity durability. That’s just the ability to endure without an increase in physiological cost. Now that is the infamous zone two argument from the endurance world.
Even if you’re not into Dernstrain, you see everyone posting, I’m doing my zone two low intensity, build a big base. What’s the whole point? Is that the bigger the base, the higher the peak, right? Cause the peak is directly proportional to the width of the base. That’s mathematical, but that’s also cardiovascular training in a nutshell, right? Is you want to build a big base. I think people understood that when it came to GPP, know, obviously the Soviets and everyone understands GPP.
But when people think of GPP, often people are thinking exercises, not GPP in terms of tissue specific adaptations or behaviors. So what I mean by that is when I think about connective tissue training, the bigger the base, the higher the peak. So to me, one of the things that is super important throughout the week is high volume, low intensity durability, which means
Tons of inputs. Obviously this is something that I know you throw down in your protocols and people understand. well connective tissue Responds differently than muscle. So it you know, there’s that six to eight hour window where it can take another stimulus It can take another stimulus. It can take another stimulus So the reason why that’s important to understand is because we want to ever increase the base Right because the bigger the base the more work I can do when it comes to intervals in cardio
But the bigger my connective tissue base is in terms of, I know they’re going to call it connective tissue architecture is the fancy word for it. But the more work I do there, the more I’ll be able to do my high intensity ISOs. So I think that there has to be direction to that, right? So what I’m talking about, so when we do our lower intensity ISOs that might be at 30 to 40 to 50 % of MVC, 60 % maybe.
I think that the people that prove that this works really well are rock climbers, right? Cause they’re doing hangboard workouts all the time. And a hangboard workout is a pretty low percentage of max for those rock climbers. And they showed in the rock climbers that it didn’t matter what weight they used. It mattered that they got a between that two and 10 minute window, right? For connective tissue as that sign of sweet spot of loading, right? Past 10 minutes, there wasn’t much gains past that.
But most hangboard workouts when it comes to rock climbing last between like 5 and 10 minutes. So the rock climbers will do that what daily. In fact, some rock climbers will do it twice a day. Now, what people tend to do is they tend to focus on the low intensity, long duration isos to get pain to come down. And then they abandon them then completely. I think that’s where the mistake is. Because…
That would be the same as if I had a pro endurance athlete, an ultra marathon or marathon or triathlete. They doing all this low intensity base work, then they start doing intervals and then they just stop doing base work. You never stop doing base work. You never stop building your base bigger. And the truth is the more high intensity work you do, the faster degradation we’re going to get of the base, right? In the more sport you do, what’s going to beat you up more than anything? Life, because we’re mother fricking humans and sport, right?
Welcome to the show, baby. So in endurance training, we understand the base must continually be built because it’s eroding the more you do of your sport and the more you do high intensity. So I think we need to steal a strategy from weightlifting in Westside, which is in the Bulgarian method, which was back when they were doing the Olympic weightlifting, they were maxing out multiple times a day. And Westside would max out
Frequently right throughout the week, but that was for the particular lift I think that connective tissue and the research and literature shows that connective tissue can be Constantly trained throughout the week So for me low intensity durability is something that people will do for two to four weeks It should never leave the program. It should always be there In fact, I think you need to spend almost all your volume building that base ever wider and ever bigger
Now high intensity repeatability is the stuff that I know is really catching on right now. And it’s, it’s just like intervals, right? When you start doing intervals, right? You’re going to see improvements very quickly, quickly week to week. So that would be your ISOs where you’re at an 80%, 90 % and all that. But what’s the goal of intervals is to constantly be able to repeat efforts above a critical point. Now that’s called critical, right?
Critical power is what’s called in the endurance world, but I view it the same way So now let’s think about this in terms of a runner or basketball player We know that there’s certain movements that are more strain on the tendon that might be because they’re in steep doors They’re in a lot of dorsiflexion. Maybe it’s that they’re doing a false step So I want you think high intensity repeatability is the ability to repeat very intense efforts in cardio
Now I want you to think the goal of high intensity isometrics is so that your tissue can sustain that over and over and over again. So the interesting thing is people are thinking in terms of, I’m just going to do, you know, five sets of four seconds on four seconds off. That’s great. Have you ever thought about building up to the point where you could do 30 sets of four seconds on four seconds off? Because
What we want to do is we want to extend out the ability to do that high intensity effort for over and over and over again, right? Because most sports aren’t just strength, right? Which would be like a high jump, right? You run up high jump strain the tendon and you’re done, right? Then you get a rest like sports like basketball running are a lot of Volume it’s a lot of strength. That’s a lot of strength endurance
So I think people get caught up in thinking tendons and they think about someone like a high jumper where it’s like, okay, I just need the tendon to strain, you know, and deal with that. It’s like, well, play spike ball for like 90 minutes, play volleyball for two hours, go for a three hour trail run and tell me that that doesn’t require that the tendon can take those hits over and over again. So when I think of how do we prepare the tissue, we need to think that we’re building the base ever bigger.
The bigger the bass, the higher the peak, the more I do down here, the more I can do up here. But the problem is people view the low intensity work as just get out of pain and then, okay, move on to heavy slow resistance and isotonics, which is not wrong, not wrong at all. I just think it should never leave the program because it’s the thing that supports everything. And you’re gonna constantly be degradating and eroding the bass.
Jake (28:53)
You were talking about that high jumper. And I think it was Karen Silvernagel I talked to. She was talking about Achilles tendon issues. And she had this category of overuse. It was overuse, and that’s the marathon runner overuse. But then it was like, what about the sprinter? You know what saying? They’re straining it so much, but a short period of time. And then the marathon runner is straining it a bit, but they do it for a long period of time. So I forget here,
exact terms now I had it in my head overuse versus like over strain maybe you know or over intensity you know I’m saying so like they yeah yeah so I’m wondering if you look at these things differently like if a marathon runner gets Achilles tendinopathy or a sprinter gets Achilles tendinopathy what was maybe in your head maybe the culprit behind that was it the same thing or is it not
Taylor Starch (29:29)
Well, go ahead.
Well, that’s dang, that’s a freaking good question. This is the mystery is like, how can someone like, Kobe Bryant or whatever, or, Clay Thompson, they jump in all these weird positions a million times and then finally goes. I think that tendons can get, it’s almost like a training for hypertrophy, right? So I’ll bring this back in a second.
I can get gains in muscle mass or hypertrophy by training at a low intensity relative to max and taking it what to failure so kind of the high volume method that would be more guys like Lee Haney Arnold and stuff like that or we have the high intensity method like Mike Metzger Doreen Yates where they were like the one set to failure now notice how both people got to the result of hypertrophy they just went there one went
did a lot of work and then got there at some maximal, one went near maximal and got there. So I think the same thing happens with tendons, right? That we see that like the endurance athletes, like the runners and the marathon runners, it doesn’t make sense to me, right? You’re talking to some people that run a hundred mile ultra marathon, they’re doing like 20, 30,000 feet of vertical gain.
Right and so think about that example I talked about in the beginning like a 7 % slope is straining the Achilles 55 % more and then Okay, so how come like ultra marathoners who run like 30,000 feet of vert over a hundred miles continuously without rest Don’t snap their Achilles like every ultra marathon and it’s because it’s such even though the strain is there it’s such a sub like it’s compared to the max mean the max strain like would be
Like, you know, I impact the ground in .8s, what is his name, about 80 milliseconds was on the ground, right? Maybe uphill on a single leg forward hop. I can’t even, I don’t even know what would be the most strain on a tendon. Maybe that video I sent you of the, the, what was it? The parkour on that Chinese mountain. That was the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever seen in my life where they’re going down like the entire mountain parkouring. Like that should blow up your tendon too. But.
I think that it’s that it’s such a low percentage of what is theoretical max because tendons just, think we’re, we, know that tendons can do amazing things. think we don’t understand how, how much load they can really absorb. And that’s that non that that’s because we have so many options of how to absorb it. And I think also in the trail running world is cause you get that variability. you’re, you’re always straining different parts of the tendon too. So I think it’s like hypertrophy that you can have a sprinter.
get injured in a marathon runner, even though you got the sprinter doing it for 10 seconds, the ultra marathon are going for 100 miles. I think it’s just like hypertrophy. You can get to Rome, you’re just taking two different ways.
Jake (32:47)
Yeah, yeah, I think it came to me. think she said overuse in the marathon runner and then overload in the like one-off event person, you know
Taylor Starch (32:55)
But in both cases,
you’re going to have suboptimal connective tissue architecture. It always comes down to that because the one thing we do know is that connective tissue has certain behaviors that are predictable. So I know the big thing now with pro sports teams is they’re going to take an ultrasound or a UC scan of the tendon. That’s freaking phenomenal.
But let’s think about almost everyone listening to this podcast or just most people like you don’t have access to that even if you do like trying to get players in to scan that so like there that’s like that’s like an external like lagging indicator of like connective tissue behavior because Reactive strength is what everyone’s obsessed with when it comes to like how do we know someone’s gonna like Jack their Achilles or Jack their patellar tendon so
we’ll pull out like force plates, right? And everyone will do jump testing and then they’ll be like, their RSI index is off. So they’re focused on like an external output in a lagging indicator, but there’s actually leading indicators internally, biologically that we can understand. So we at least know that connective tissue has a normal stress strain behavior, which means that
It’s a one to one, which is freaking nice. Thank God. I suck at math. I just 135, 225, 315, 405. You know how it is. So when it comes to connective tissue, it has a normal stress strain curve, one to one. You add more strain, which for people listening, that’s more length. You’re going to get more stress and it’s a nice one to one. Well, we know that abnormal connective tissue is going to have an abnormal stress strain curve. What does that mean?
That means instead of this nice escalator, of tension, so tension strain, meaning as I head further into length or I had further to end range, I should have this nice increase in stress or strain on the tendon, right? Or the connective tissue, right? When we have abnormal connective tissue, we are going to experience abnormal stress for the same amount of length. That’s a fancy way of saying, I want you to think about like an escalator out like the molar.
Or stuff where it’s going up nice and smooth nice and smooth now I want you to picture you take that same connective tissue and because of fibrosis because of damage because of I only load this line of the tissue and I don’t have variability in my training and variability in sport and remember sport You’re just trying to crush you’re just trying to win games. So sport is about It’s it’s about demonstration not about adaptation training is about adaptation, right?
So that’s where we need to make sure that we’re getting the variability in. If we have the variability in training, we’ll be able to express that in our sport, right? So when I have abnormal connective tissue, whether it’s a sprinter or a marathon runner, or I’ve got like an operator who’s rocking 20 miles, we’re gonna see now an elevator where that stress skyrockets for the same amount of length. So let’s think about what that means.
That means they’re experiencing significantly more stress for the same amount of strain or length that they should. That’s a problem because that means when we do normal stuff or we do that’s where someone’s running like a freaking Drake Greenlaw or Sean Watson, they’re not doing anything crazy and the Achilles tendon just blows, right? So
There might be numerous factors that are coming to play, right? Genetics, we know there’s the different subtypes of how the Achilles spirals. We actually even know that there’s these, have you heard about the piezo channels, the piezo ion channels before, the subtypes?
Jake (36:52)
Yes, yeah, but I think I might be off. Yeah, go ahead, talk about it. I have heard of it,
Taylor Starch (36:58)
Yeah, yeah, so, yeah, I know it’s
crazy. Like this is little bit of a tangent, but like in 20, I think it was like three years ago, four years ago, like the, these two researchers guys, like the Nobel Peace Prize for like, cause we’re just starting to understand how tendons and connective tissue develops stiffness. Like every single person on internet will say, oh, we want stiff tendons, but I don’t, we’re still understanding what that means. But like, I think it was like four years ago that like the Nobel Peace Prize was a couple of guys like research and they found these
piezo like ion channels in the tendons that are basically mechanosensitive and when there was the sliding of the tendons and fascicles that sheer stress opens up those channels and basically up regulates some enzymes that are responsible for linking collagen together which is freaking awesome now the crazy thing about that is there’s variations of those piezo channels and like
If you have a certain variation, think that your like tendons are like 30 % stiffer and you can jump higher. And it’s even crazy too. Apparently those channels like prevent like malaria from killing you to a certain degree. It’s like, that’s when you realize we don’t know as much as we think we know about this stuff. But like I said, there’s so much stuff that we don’t know, but what we do know is that abnormal connective tissue
Whether I also like to say this people are like, how do I know I have abnormal connective tissue if it’s tight or doesn’t feel all right or all right, right? That’s a silly thing because most people don’t speak our language. And if I say connective tissue, strain stiffness, you and I are like nerding out and everyone listening to this podcast is like, you get all excited. When I talk to normal people, they just don’t have any concept of that. So
When stuff feels abnormally tight, when it’s not right, that’s the Christian McCaffrey. Did you see like Christian McCaffrey for weeks in training camp was like, my Achilles doesn’t feel right. They didn’t do UC scans, but that right there is a leading indicator that they should have checked to see if the stress strain curve of his connective tissue was normal or abnormal. How do we do that? We have to take the tissue to length. Now that can be done, that should be done passively, right? Cause we’re trying to assess.
the passive mechanics, obviously you want to actively too as well. But when I have that abnormal stress strain curve, we know we have abnormal connective tissue. What does that mean? It’s disorganized, it’s shitty, it’s tight, it’s not all right. And now we’re going to have abnormal force transmission. Abnormal force transmission means we have less variability, we have more uniformity, which sounds like a good thing, but it’s actually bad because we’re not spreading the force out and dissipating it.
then the strong stuff gets stronger, the weak stuff gets weaker, and then it’s like the chicken or the egg. Does the strong stuff break because it’s doing all the work or is it the weak stuff that slowly degrades, atrophies, and that’s the stuff that goes? And the answer is, I think it’s a little bit of both and I’m sure it depends on the person. So we can look for that in training. We can train that quality. So in your training, you can look for that abnormal stress strain curve
in certain positions. Now, once again, I said it has to be, we have to assess that. We have to train that at length, right? Which is, you can’t assess that at shortness because we need that passive tension in that passive length tension relationship of connective tissue to show up. But that’s so important. So I’m not saying that we could have done isos and stopped Christian McCaffrey’s Achilles issues, but he started feeling abnormal connective tissue. Now he,
Said it didn’t feel all right. That’s a signal saying his central nervous system, which is all about what surviving right? senses via the mechanoreceptors There is abnormal stress strain curve meaning if I put stress into this tissue It is going to exceed the normal stress strain curve So then his nervous system gives him a perception or a tissue resonance of this is not right and then what starts happening?
you start loading it less and then we get the stress shielding, we get the fear, we get the psychology and all that above. So it’s super important to understand that behavior of connective tissue because we can look for it in training, we can train it and we can improve it. And if we know we’re improving those behaviors, that’s the low intensity durability at the bottom. You always need to be training for connective tissue architecture and making sure that we normalize those abnormal stress strain curves and they’re all over the body.
Just because I train here doesn’t mean that my connective tissue out here is doing okay. And I think that’s frustrating to people because they’re like, well, I just, what’s, what’s the squat hinge push pull today? There’s nothing wrong with that. But I think that we’re naive to think that if I do a simple, you know, have ISO in one position that I get all the different lines.
Jake (42:03)
Okay, yeah, I’m trying to think now when you talk about this architecture kind of being messed up I recently talked to Peter Malieris and he he kind of had two camps he was looking at he was looking at the Keith Barr thing with the stress relaxation how you have like a The area of pathology and if you hold an isometric you get the stress relaxation get the load in that area But then you also have the fluid that like maybe a more acute tendon pain like just fills with fluid and that hurts and then you could just squeeze out the fluid and like get a normalization How are you looking at?
restoring the architecture to something normal so that there’s a normal stress strain. Is it like graded isometrics or what?
Taylor Starch (42:43)
Yeah,
yeah, friggin I think this is where we’re realizing that I mean, it’s it’s crazy. So like the we definitely need more research and research will always come around 20 years later to tell us what we’re doing is working right. I think Charlie Francis said that I love that quote where he’s like research just tells me what I’ve been doing is already working. I’m like, I love that. Like when you look in like the like in the literature or the evidence base for like, what do we do to
It’s it’s really not there, especially when it comes to insertional Achilles 90 % of it is like, okay Here’s what you do for surgery. Here’s the outcomes whether you have like if you have like Haglund’s deformity Which is a bone deformity which can impact insertional Achilles on a side note by the way when I hear Haglund’s deformity It makes me think of Hagrid. So it’s like you’re a wizard Harry Side note, but like all the research is basically like
Hey, do E-Centrics work? And I even think their eccentric protocols don’t make any sense. Like I’m a gym rat and I’ve never done four by 25 E-Centrics twice a day for like a month straight. like, it just doesn’t even make, I’m like, what are you guys doing? Like there’s a difference between emphasizing an E-Centric and performing one. So all the research on E-Centrics, well, I like it and it shows that it can have benefits. I think it’s just garbage. It’s like no one is doing.
4×25 eccentrics with a backpack off the side of that and then going, you know, so the research when it comes to Achilles is basically like, okay, shockwave therapy and do the eccentrics. It’s like there’s nothing out there that it’s literally like that. I’m like, okay, that’s not wrong. Basically it’s like, okay, if you do something and if you do more than one thing, it’s probably better than nothing. Okay, well, cool. That’s not helpful. So I think that we got to think about it multiple layers is
We know that when it comes to influencing behaviors at length, we need to train at length. Now that sounds simple. It’s a little bit hard with this assertional Achilles because that’s the problem is you can’t get into that dorsiflexion because of the compression, but we have to be at length to start influencing those behaviors. And then the whole point is we have kind of three ways we can go about business when it comes to connective tissue. And I know there’s more. We can.
change the load which you could argue is an intensity game right and like I said stop we need to stop playing the game whether we do high intensity or low intensity that would be saying should I go for easy runs or should I do intervals are both like both so we can affect the load which is intensity right we have the duration right which we can consider as volume so we have length load and time are the big three when it comes to connective tissue we want to
train at length. Now if we can’t get into length because like an insertional issue, obviously start outside of length and head your way there. But the problem is people aren’t constantly chasing more and more length. They’re just holding the isos until pain goes away. That’s not wrong. We don’t want to be in pain. If we’re in pain, we can’t load as much. We’re not going to be able to train and load as much. So obviously, but we need to be constantly challenging more and more length because length equals strain.
we need to constantly be challenging load either A to maximize absolute strength of that connective tissue, which would be like maximal effort method from like a West side or the endurance of that kind of like that repeatability I talked about. Show me people that are trying to extend the repeatability of connective tissues ability absorb force. I don’t know of anyone doing that, meaning like, okay, you can do four by 30 seconds.
How about 30 by 30 seconds with no loss into an eccentric? Meaning, obviously, if holding an ISO and we start dipping into an eccentric, we’re changing behaviors. So I’m talking how much volume sets and reps can you do before there’s a change in behavior to eccentric? I don’t know the answer. It’s kind of like a cool science experiment. I don’t know what it’s going to lead to. But if you had two runners and you had runner A who could do four sets of four.
Like almost like the berlin you can do five sets of four seconds on four seconds off And then all of a after that point they started losing the ice and going to the eccentric Let’s say you took that runner now. They can do 50 sets And they’ve never increased the weight for an entire year. The weight never increased. Is that person better? In my opinion, yes because the goal of training is progress if overload
At the end of the day, we’re progressing, right? And we’re progressively overloading, which is proof or a receipt that our body is adapting. And how do we know it’s adapting? Well, like we said, we have load, length, and time when it comes to the 10. So number one, you have to know how to manipulate volume, intensity, and density. And I talk about this all the time.
Lots of people know exercises for certain areas. Okay, you know, i’ve got knee issues i’m gonna hit my leg extension isos freaking phenomenal But just because you list off a bunch of ingredients doesn’t mean you know how to cook in the kitchen, right? Chef ramsey proved this watch a season of hell’s kitchen You’ve got people that have resumes that say i’m a chef And then they start putting ingredients together and they can’t cook worth anything So just because you have a bunch of isos
doesn’t mean six months from now that person is going to have restored that normal connective tissue behavior and then is back to kicking ass and taking names because what’s the number one like like predetermining factor that you’re going to get an injury when it comes to running especially you’ve had it before so we’re really good at getting people out of pain but we’re really bad about keeping people out of pain so it’s it this is where it’s hard because
It’s you have to know how to manipulate volume intensity and density over time to achieve a result Not just get someone out of pain, right? So that’s where iso’s at length is a starting point, but it’s not an ending point And this is where people get in trouble We know connective tissue takes long times a long time to develop and that’s so frustrating, right? But the great news it takes a long time to degrade to that’s why people Right don’t have any issues until they’re 30 35 40 45 50
And then all of they’re like, why are all my tendons blowing up in a disaster? It’s like, well, if they would have been looking for that abnormal connective tissue, that abnormal stress strain, increased tension at length, and they would have been building their base, they probably would run into a few less issues, I would predict. So you have to be able to know how to cook, right? Just because you’ve got a bunch of ingredients doesn’t mean the dish is gonna taste good. Now it could be edible, meaning like you could eat it and technically get away with it, but I’m sure it’s not gonna taste that good. So.
ISOs is where we start and ISOs at length is where we begin But you don’t ever read the first chapter of the book and stop unless it’s a terrible book You got to keep reading and progressing to the end of the story So then we need to keep changing either the length the load or the time Right volume intensity density and you need to be a master of those three variables and most people aren’t they’re just doing exercises They’re not progressively overloaded
Then we have to understand that we don’t want to just be good in a position at length. We need to be able to develop the next behavior, is length very quickly, right? Which is stiffness very quickly, which is the reactive strength. So then we got to start challenging the speed of that connective tissue at length, which I don’t see happening at all. So now we need to start thinking oscillatory isos. Isos where we start to do ballistic work, Ballistic isometrics.
Then we can start having a conversation about everyone’s favorite slow eccentrics. But then even there, it’s crazy. When it comes to building like bones for running, you’ve got to progressively push people up what’s called the bone ladder, which means you might start with like pogo hops, but eventually that’s not stimulating enough to the bone, especially for running. So now you need to work your way to like depth drops or single leg forward hops, because you got to progressively challenge that. What everyone does is they just do isos.
They never increase the ability to do isos at greater lengths. They never increase the ability due to for longer durations or greater loads. Some people do, right? Then they never develop that connective tissues ability to then handle those loads quickly. And then that’s just, we’ve just been talking about isometric behavior. Then it’s time to do the dynamic stuff. But the truth is people need far more static work than dynamic work, but they almost have those ratios flipped because you’ll see people doing tons of plyo work.
tons of dynamic work and they don’t have any foundation to build upon. So that’s a long winded answer, but the point is we have to start with those. And then the weird thing is you’re talking about like, so the isometrics and that fluid flow, but have you seen the research when it comes to like, fascicle sliding, when it comes to like what exercises do really good when it comes to that.
Jake (52:02)
Yes, recently and I’ve been sent by a few people and I’m just like this study kind of sucks because it was like five exercises and one of them was like a calf stretch. So it’s like this is the best for interph… yeah, fast sliding but I’m like you only tested five things. You should have tested like… That’s what it was, yeah. And it was, yeah.
Taylor Starch (52:15)
Yeah.
Is that the one where they found out that the soleus raise was the best? Yeah, yeah.
And it’s like, it’s kind of like, I’m like, really? Like, I get it. I’m the biggest sole, dude, I’ve got a soleus raise in my garage. I’m the biggest soleus fanatic on the planet. And I think that’s the same thing where, right? So people are going to say, well, you know, what’s the best for, should we do heavy, slow isotonics?
Should we do KUN-centric? Should we do E-centric? And you’re gonna have everyone in their favorite camp. You’re gonna have the ISO guys who are like, well yeah, know, the ISOs are gonna squeeze out the water in the tendon. And I’m like, yeah guys, let’s roll it. Then you’re gonna have the E-centric people being like, well, you can load the tendon more when you do an E-centric. And I’m like, let’s go, let’s do it. And then you’re gonna have the KEN-centric people be like, well, the literature shows that it creates the slide and glide, and it’s going to increase the fascicle sliding. like, let’s go.
Like how silly is it to argue like whether we should be doing ISO, eccentric or concentric? It’s like kind of like in the matrix, people are like, do you take the red pill or the blue pill? People are like, take the red pill. I’m like, swallow them both and see what happens. It’s, I’m, do it, do it. Because it like every, like the whole point of the conjugate system in West side was saying, Hey, we need to train multiple qualities at once because they learned in block periodization while it was highly effective that if you’re not training
certain behaviors or certain qualities or certain aspects of sport performance, they degrade very quickly. So instead of thinking, I’m these next 12 weeks, I’m in Iceland, the next 12 weeks, I’m in this land. That’s not wrong. There’s nothing wrong with that. You should be saying, how am I training multiple behaviors a week? Because each one is training different qualities, different tissues and what might, what the muscle might like, the tendons like, man, I don’t really care. Like
Like I picture like connective tissue as like home bodies or recluses you’re like, hey the muscles like hey, bro Let’s go out. Let’s go do something and the connective tissues like bro. I just want to stay here Right. So the yield that’s why I just want to stay in I don’t want I just don’t I don’t want to go anywhere Right, so that ISO is at length, right? And then the muscles like I just want to go somewhere. I just want to move or I just want to I’ve been staying at home all day I just want to move so that’s why we know that
when you’re moving or isotonic that yes it is creating stiffness in the tendon but also that’s a musc- like I don’t think you would ever develop that strong of connective tissue because here’s the deal when we’re moving we don’t get to pick where the load’s going have you ever I’m gonna sound like the biggest boomer right now have you ever you know Price is Right? yeah yeah I’m gonna I’m gonna sound like a boomer because like half the people will be like Price is Right hopefully people still remember there was a game called Plinko
Right? There’s all these like metal notches and then you drop the disc in it. You’re trying to get the middle which has like the million bucks and then it starts hitting and the disc is going all over and it’s about to go in the million that shoots off. That’s force transmission. If you want the best example of force transmission on the planet, watch Plinko on the Price is Right. That’s exactly what happens. When we’re training, our goal is we’re trying to funnel the stress into the stuff that needs it. Right? Because when we’re playing sport,
We’re just expressing and demonstrating our capacities and our strength. It’s a demonstration of our abilities and now we’re just practicing versus training Right and practice in sport is going to accommodate our tissues, which is okay because we want to do epic stuff in life but When it comes to force, right? When when we’re doing something quick and we’re moving we don’t get to pick where force goes so it’s like plinko You’re like I want that million dollars you drop it in and it’s like
and you’re like, you think you’re gonna get it and then shoots off into another line of tissue. So that’s why we have to hold positions because if we, that’s why plyometrics, this is just my take, I might be wrong. This is why plyometrics I think don’t increase tendon stiffness or structural or morphological changes is because it happens so quick that.
Force is just gonna go where it goes. That’s the dynamic system, right? The human body is a nonlinear dynamic system that’s non-uniform and it’s force transmission and dissipation. So, if we’re moving quick, it’s gonna be more a top-down behavior of the central nervous system, removing inhibitions to be able to just let the fascicles pull and gear, which is where I think people get in trouble because people are having all these tendon issues.
And they’re doing nervous system style training or muscular dominant training in attempt to fix a connective tissue issue. So you have the top down, which is the nervous system component of reactive strength. And you have the bottom up, which is the tissue based behavior of connective tissue and tendon. So if I don’t understand that, if I just go and span cabras to failure, let’s say you do cabras to failure, that’s freaking awesome. Freaking awesome.
The muscle is just as important as the connective tissue, which is just as important as the range of motion of the calcaneus, whatever you want to get into. There’s no one is better than the other. Now, certain people lack in certain areas, right? But I’ve got to think about that if I just do like cabraisers to failure, your thought process is, well, the fascicles are sliding, but are the ones that you need to stimulate the one sliding.
That’s the question and I think that’s where we run into issues is we think just because of the research something shows sliding Well, is it the stuff that you want meaning like for insertional Achilles? We’re seeing that the subtendon of the lateral gastroc for most people I think it’s like two-thirds of people is the anterior portion Which is the weak unloaded portion that gets like where the pain comes from right near the bursa So for most people that’s represented by the soleus and the lateral gastroc
So just because I do cab raises, right? I might completely miss those subtends even though there’s nothing wrong with improving stuff, right? We want to make our strengths stronger and our weaknesses better. But I think that’s where it’s super important to not start this false dichotomy where people say, you want to do ISOs and not E-Centrics or E-Centrics and not ISOs. It’s like, it all. And why most people run into issues is because they don’t know how to program. They don’t know how to cook.
They don’t know how to get from point A to point B, right? It’s crazy. If I gave you a recipe right now and you messed up the volume of ingredients, so say it said for like one teaspoon of salt and you put in two tablespoons and then you didn’t cook the chicken long enough and then you forgot an ingredient. You might, like I said, the dish theoretically is edible, but it’s not very good to taste. So I think that’s where people run to issues.
is they know what to do on Tuesday, but they don’t know what to do two months from now in terms of progression connective tissue because they’re thinking about exercises, not adaptations. We want to think about adaptations and then pick our exercises, not the other way around.
Jake (59:37)
Okay, we’re gonna have to do a part two, because we’re at an hour. So yeah, let’s do that. I wanted to talk a bit about bones and the relationship with tendons, but let’s do that next time. For now, tell everyone where to find you.
Taylor Starch (59:43)
Yeah, balls.
Okay? Yeah.
Yeah,
the internet’s normally where I tell people to start. It’s also a good place. I’m on the Gram YouTube. I’m out there in the ether. Just type in Taylor Starch and you will find me.
Jake (1:00:07)
Alright man, thanks for coming on, we’ll do it again soon.
Taylor Starch (1:00:10)
See you, Bob.
