Deloads and Tendon Adaptation

The most expensive lesson I’ve learnt in training is that strength can rise faster than the tissues holding it together. In my first year on rings my pulling strength jumped, I added muscle-ups and lots of handstand volume, and a forearm tendon told me, firmly, that it hadn’t been consulted. A few weeks of reduced training later I took deloads a lot more seriously.

This is the general lesson, not a rehab guide. If something hurts, see a professional.

Why tendons lag

Muscle responds to training quickly: you feel stronger within weeks. Tendons are slower. They have a far poorer blood supply, and their collagen turns over slowly. Research on tendon adaptation in healthy adults suggests meaningful changes in stiffness and structure take months of consistent, fairly heavy loading, not weeks (Bohm, Mersmann and Arampatzis, 2015). In the short term after hard exercise, breakdown can briefly outpace building (Magnusson, Langberg and Kjaer, 2010).

So the muscle writes cheques the tendon can’t yet cash. Rings and bar work make this worse because so much of it, the false grip, muscle-up transitions, handstand wrist extension, loads the forearms and elbows in positions they’re not used to.

Short bouts, long rests

Keith Baar’s lab at UC Davis has an interesting angle on this. In engineered ligament experiments, the cellular signal that drives collagen production peaked after about ten minutes of loading and then switched off, and the cells took around six hours to become responsive again. Their practical suggestion: a few minutes of loading, then hours of rest.

The caveats matter. The engineered tissue behaves more like young tendon than adult tendon, and there are no large human trials yet. But it lines up neatly with what worked for me: short, frequent handstand sessions of ten to fifteen minutes, sometimes twice a day, rather than one long grind.

How I deload now

• Every fourth to sixth week, or earlier if progress stalls or fatigue builds.
• Same movements, much less load: roughly half the volume, nothing near failure. Mobility, easy cardio, good sleep.
• Swap, don’t stop, when something is grumpy: fists or parallettes instead of flat-palm push-ups, neutral grip instead of false grip, wall walks or pike holds instead of long handstands. Keep moving, cut the aggravating pattern.
• After it feels fine, wait one more week before going back to the thing that caused it.
• Max test at the end of the deload. Very often that’s where the PRs show up: I hit my best weighted pull-ups and dips straight after one.
• Don’t race or test through existing pain. I learnt that one the hard way at a race.

And the simplest rule of all: the number one goal is not getting injured. Consistency only comes from taking recovery seriously.

The engineering version: deloads are tech-debt sprints

Delivery teams follow the same arc I used to: a run of strong progress, then a plateau, then pushing harder to compensate, then something breaks. The tissue that lags isn’t the code. It’s the organisation around it: the docs, the on-call knowledge, the test suite, the deployment pipeline, the people.

• Capacity grows faster than structure. You can ship features faster than you can make them operable.
• Plan the deload. A short, scheduled week every four to six sprints to pay down debt, upgrade dependencies, delete dead paths and let processes catch up.
• Watch for the signs: lead time creeping up, change-failure rate rising, people tired.
• Max test afterwards: measure delivery again once the deload is done. Usually it’s better.

It’s the same insight as Progressive Overload and Incremental Migration, from the other direction: increase load steadily, and give the slow-adapting parts time to catch up.

Sources

• Hamilton, K. & Baar, K. (2023). How to improve our tendon health with training. Human Performance Alliance playbook.
• Baar, K. (2017). Minimizing injury and maximizing return to play: lessons from engineered ligaments. Sports Medicine, 47(Suppl 1), 5–11.
• Bohm, S., Mersmann, F. & Arampatzis, A. (2015). Human tendon adaptation in response to mechanical loading: a systematic review and meta-analysis of exercise intervention studies on healthy adults. Sports Medicine – Open, 1, 7.
• Magnusson, S. P., Langberg, H. & Kjaer, M. (2010). The pathogenesis of tendinopathy: balancing the response to loading. Nature Reviews Rheumatology, 6, 262–268.