If you are one of the many who are guilty of it, don’t ignore your tendon pain, as all you are doing is prolonging the pathway to recovery. Maybe the pain is only slight, it doesn’t stop you doing anything, but it is definitely there and maybe getting worse?
Ignore it at your peril. It doesn’t just go away over time or indeed with rest.
It’s that time of year again when we start to dust off the summer sporting gear, fire up the hiking boots and maybe look at tackling some of those long-awaited home projects. Its springtime, optimism is in the air and life is good. Unfortunately, many people’s plans will be derailed by a nagging pain that they just seem to wake up one morning with. One day your living life to the fullest and then somewhere along the line a nagging pain starts to set in and just doesn’t seem to go away. It’s a common story we hear in the clinic and often it points towards tendon pain. The good news is that tendons get better with the right management and are among the most common conditions we treat in the clinic.
Typically, tendon pain will have these characteristics:
You did something you usually don’t do.
Tendons like consistency and a sudden increase in load without enough preparation can cause them to get irritated. Whether it’s training for a long run, hiking in the Porongurups or putting a fresh coat of paint in the living room, these are all increases in load and may cause tendons to get overloaded.
It’s sore when you touch it.
Our body is pretty good at signalling when something is not right (that’s what pain is intended for!) but sometimes that mechanism goes a bit haywire and it becomes unhelpful. Nevertheless, if it wasn’t sore and now it is, your body is probably trying to tell you something.
Next morning stiffness and pain that tends to ease as you get warmed up.
Tendons are usually good at doing things fast, but they are sometimes slow when it comes to sending those pain messages. Whilst it will be sore when you start using it, the pain often (but not always) lessens as you get warmed up and potentially even disappears for a while until the next morning when that pain message and stiffness will really come through.
If this sounds like you, you’ve likely irritated a tendon. Don’t ignore it as tendon pain doesn’t go away on its own. Get in early for treatment, learn to change your exercise pattern, do the right exercises at the right time and you will get better quicker.
