Let’s talk anatomy for a moment or two. In the classical conception, we have muscles that attach to bones via tendons. (Nowadays, we talk about the myofascial system and it’s a lot more connected than previously thought, but for the current purpose, the old way works well enough.) Tendons are thick pieces of connective tissue and they are less elastic than our muscles. When we do weight training, we are of course strengthening our muscles, but we can also strengthen our tendons.
Why would we want to do that? Hypermobile people need strong tendons to keep their bodies together. The rest of us also need our muscles to stay attached.
The People Who Do Research have done some and what they learned is that isokinetic exercises are great for strengthening tendons. That five-dollar word there? It means exercises in which the movement takes place with an even cadence over the same distance. What we need in order to do this work is a simple metronome app, or an actual metronome if one happens to be lying around from the days when we took music lessons.
(In theory, we could just count evenly as we did our reps. It turns out that we all make lousy metronomes and it is worth getting a free app and letting it handle that for us.)
Even if we’re not super excited about the idea of getting strong tendons, it’s a new way to play with our exercises, and who doesn’t want that?
