Chances are, unless you’ve worked with an FRS certified personal trainer or attended some functional range systems seminars yourself, you’ve never specifically trained your connective tissue with intent. Now, considering most injuries occur in the connective tissue, it is quite strange that we don’t spend more time ensuring it is strong enough for our needs.
I, like most people trying to improve their fitness, did not even consider that you could train or should specifically train your connective tissue. Instead, the majority of the time we focus on training our superficial tissue to look good. Even when it comes to cardio, most people are focused on calories burned rather than actually improving their cardiovascular health. This leads us down a road that ends in a body full of stiffness, injuries, and plateaus. Without training the connective tissue and other deeper tissues, we build a dysfunctional body that may look good, but doesn’t feel good. With that being said, I’m here, as your trusted personal trainer, to tell you that you CAN eat your cake and have it too. With intelligent training you can look, move, and feel amazing.
You can train your connective tissue in 1 of 2 ways. By training at length, with isometrics, or to length, with eccentrics.
Training at length with isometrics means moving to your end range where the tissue you are training is fully lengthened. You then contract isometrically against the stretch.
Training to length with eccentrics, means funnelling all your energy into the lowering portion of the rep, and then cheating your way back to the top through the concentric portion. You could perform these slow and controlled to improve strength or with speed to improve the ability of the tissue to rapidly stiffen.
If you want to improve connective tissue architecture (lay more of it) you want a time under tension of at least two minutes total. If you want to improve the load bearing capacity of the connective tissue, you would load it specifically in a way, you, as an individual, require it to be strong. Ask yourself, what loads does it need to be able to handle and at what speed will it endure those loads?
Without specifically training the connective tissue to meet the demands you place on it, you are asking for injuries. It is certainly one area that most people neglect, the other being their joints, but that is for another blog. Because most people have never trained their connective tissue specifically, it will be low hanging fruit. This means you will be able to make rapid gains and your regular lifts or sports performance should benefit greatly.
With this being a new concept to most, finding a personal trainer who has experience training this way can be a great help to at least onboard you to this area of training. I would also be happy to discuss further or answer any questions with anyone who is interested. You can reach out here – Contact Tommy Kudoba Fitness – Personal Trainers Kitchener, ON
