A couple of months ago, I was talking with Bryan Chung, MD, PhD (and a bunch of other letters after his name) from www.evidencebasedfitness.blogspot.com about why eccentric training, particularly painful eccentric training (how fun!!), showed such improvements in subject pain complaints in those with previously painful conditions like patellar tendonosis or achilles tendonosis.

He mentioned that the eccentric contractions obliterated the neomicrocirculation (new capillaries) that entered the tendon and pain reduction resulted.

Pretty cool, eh?

I was reading the new Journal of Orthopedic and Sports Physical Therapy during lunch and came across an article that showed similar findings. With 12 weeks of painful eccentric training came a 45% reduction in paratendon blood flow AND a 48% reduction in pain. No negative effects were found in the paratendinous tissues.

Those of you dealing with painful conditions like patellar tendonosis (your doc may be calling it tendonitis and may very well be wrong…tendonitis usually clears up in a couple weeks, tendonosis doesn’t), tennis elbow, golfers elbow, achilles tendonosis, etc., you may want to consider adding 3 sets of 12-15 reps of daily, painful eccentric training to your program.

Yeah, it doesn’t sound fun, but there’s good evidence that it’ll be helpful.

Bill