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Anyone have advice on tendon recovery from exercise? Something's clearly wrong with me but I don't know what. I'm a male, ever since I was 15 or so (I'm 22 now) when I push any set of any exercise to failure, I get tendinitis from it. I assume that's not normal? For example, my muscles are not tired at the end of a set of max rep pushups, it's one of my tendons (tricep, or sometimes pec) that hurts instead, I feel like my muscles could keep going. This is the same for all exercises, been this way for years, and briefly by course of good luck and planning and pushing almost to failure but not quite, I have managed to do things like weighted dips, weighted pullups, etc. before developing tendinopathy from those and having to scale back.
If I workout even further away from failure, like legitimately easy intensity, I'm fine painwise but don't make any progress in muscle or strength. I've tried dialing back volume, I just regress to being able to handle less volume and the same problems pop up.
At age 15, when this started, I did have a bunch of weird issues pop up: I had a growth spurt where my scoliosis went from mild to severe, then I got a really bad flu, then I went from sleeping 8+ hours a night every night at age 14 and prior, to sleeping 5 hours in broken intervals at age 15.5, unable to sleep more no matter what I do (I'd just keep waking up too frequently). Ever since then, I have slept the exact same way, once a year I sleep 7 hours and feel a difference, but I don't know what I did to sleep that long so I go right back to the pattern.
When this started, I felt very unrefreshed with a lot of brain fog at age 15.5, this is also when I had a relapse of anorexia (which was on/off from ages 9-20, mostly on from age 9-12 and 15.5-20 however). Then somehow my brain adapted to this amount of sleep, the brain fog and tiredness went away, and I actually started doing better in school than I had before all this despite no sleep improvement. But I was left with these exercise issues. Part of me thinks I am sleeping enough for my brain, but not enough for my body, yet the brain is what has a drive to sleep, so if my brain has figured out how to get it done on less, it just isn't going to have the sleep drive to match my body's needs. So I need a way to force deep sleep.
Nobody has been able to tell me exactly what caused these issues; was it the sleep? Was it the anorexia? I will say since recovering from anorexia, I was able to get way stronger than before recovery. But "way stronger" is still weak by human male standards. I had a brief period when I first recovered weight quickly at age 19.5-20 or so, that all my joints actually felt amazing, and I was sleeping 5.5-6 hours. But after that it went away (maybe in part due to a legit episode of bad insomnia at age 20.5, happened to coincide with onset of some GI issues that have only recently resolved) and now I'm stuck feeling almost the same way I did before recovery, but just at a much higher strength level than before and more overall capacity for exercise than before, but still the same feelings now of not being able to push to failure without pain, anywhere in the body. Somehow, at age 21.5-22, I pushed heavy weight for the first time with really low reps and low intensity (reps in reserve), and made a ton of progress again despite not feeling like I could recover from a serious workout with less reps in reserve. But then I got pain from it and had to regress again, I think I got up to a 100lb split squat, 50 lb weighted pullup, and what's probably the equivalent of 160-180 lb bench press (dips at 125 lbs bodyweight with 70 added pounds) for low reps before needing to regress.
I know my wrist size is only 5.2"/1st percentile for men, ankle size is only 7"/1st percentile for men, and limb lengths are 1st percentile for men despite 10-15th percentile height, and despite 50th percentile height parents and everyone in my generation of the family is at the 75th percentile in height. I also have osteoporosis from the anoreixa.
The one thing that grew normally is my shoulder width and pelvic width and that's largely post-recovery from anorexia that it started growing again from below average to average/even 60th percentile. I have a feeling all of this points to growth stunting from anorexia; is a 1st percentile frame size somehow mean I already reached my genetic natty limit at 100 lb split squats and 180 lb bench press? Can't be right, there are people who are much shorter than me who can build more muscle than I have so far, right?
Some question I have too that could help others with my problems (and myself obviously):
Are there any binaural beat or breathwork techniques for inducing delta wave states consciously, to mimic deep sleep and release HGH? Does anorexia stunt your tendon development as much as it stunts bone development? Does HGH help you build up your tendon tissue? Does this sound like anything you've heard of? How much does psychological stress affect your tendon recovery independent of other bodily systems?
How much does mindset matter in this? I feel like when I was making progress last time at age 21.5-22.0, I really believed I could get stronger, and then I saw some videos of people hurting their tendons and got kind of scared, and at this same time was when I seemed to get tendinopathy again. Could be a coincidence, but it was kind of spooky how that happened. Now I'm falling back into some old beliefs I had about something being fundamentally wrong with my body (part of why I justified my eating disorder to myself, after the joint pain started at age 15, my eating disorder worsened because I justified it to myself as I was genetically inferior, which ended up not being very true because I had some really good periods of strenthening post-anorexia as I described above, and I'm still way stronger than I ever imagined I would be at age 15, but it's still a beginner strength level and I want more if at all possible).
I wonder, if as a result of that limited mindset, I'm not making much progress? Even though I'm equally motivated to exercise, something about the mindset must be changing the fundamental quality of my muscular contractions (more apprehension perhaps) and this develops tendinopathy in those places? See a video of someone hurting themselves, get apprehensive, area gets strained due to less-coordinated contractions, you get hurt? Is that even a thing?
I know my testosterone level is at 500 on the nose. I have osteoporosis from the anorexia too, but it seems largely due to small bone diameter (stunted appositional growth) and only slightly due to low volumetric bone density, that is the bone quality itself seems to be good now (post-recovery) but the bones are small enough that the 2-dimensional "areal" density is very low. I still am about 0.5 to 1 standard deviation less in "true 3-D density" than normal, but not as bad as my DXA scan makes it look. Actually, if someone knows of a way to boost appositional growth of bones at this age, that'd be interesting to hear. I assume HGH could do it? And I assume I should keep gaining to BMI of 21 or 22 just to see if that would help (I'm at BMI 20 now).
Sorry for the long rambling post, thanks if anyone read through it or has any advice.
Look I'm just going to drop this here, and you can reach out to me if you have more questions or are open to this idea but...
I had major RSI and tendinitis and other issues all throughout my body for years. Had to leave work multiple times on medical leave, at some points could barely talk or use my hands because my muscular pain was so bad.
Turns out it was all psychosomatic or 'emotional'. The mind and the body are far more connected than most realize.
Just a thought, but your issues strike me as less of a mechanical issue and more like something I had. If you're curious about how I worked through it feel free to DM/ask.
Interesting, thank you, I will send a DM.
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That is kind of crazy sounding. We obviously need more details! How did you aquire such problems and how did you fix them!?!
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There is way too much going on here to offer an answer that’s in any way complete, but just two cents offered from a few decades more experience than you (I’m in mid-40s). Life has chapters / seasons. Weirdly, something that (a) happens without reason or (b) was achievable in one particular season/chapter just reverses or becomes (or seems) impossible in another. It’s desperately hard to do, a million times easier said than done, but I’ll say it anyway. Try not to sweat all this too much. The mind is an instrument of a type of power we’re scarcely beginning to understand, so the way you’re thinking about all this is almost certainly having a massive influence on your reality. Practice breathing. Practice recognising joy and beauty (more than proactively seeking them out). Practice present moment awareness (because every past moment and every future moment are always colored by the present moment that’s actually thinking about them). And good luck. 🙏
Thanks, I really appreciate the advice. I think you've answered it better than anyone I've asked, in that I should probably be putting more focus on how I'm thinking about this (and NOT thinking about it too much) versus trying to figure out every little detail that explains everything. I have been trying to do some breathwork lately, so we'll see how that goes. Good point on the present moment awareness...I have tended to suck at that, so that's something to work on for sure.
Good luck with it all. You’re so young (I know you probably don’t feel that, but you are … I remember when I was 22. I might have projected knowledge and certainty but looking back I was completely clueless about myself and everything around me.)
I’ve always been bad at breath work too. It gets better when I realised that one of the main points of breath work is present moment awareness. And you can get to present moment awareness without sweating the breath work too much.
Running is my breath work. The breathing happens as a side effect of the running so I get the benefit without the mind restlessness.
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