Tissue Re-Education

I was recently contacted by a fellow colleague in high-performance ice hockey regarding our first phase of the off-season.  We call this phase the tissue re-education phase. I was first made aware of this and its proposed adaptations through a friend and colleague Jim Snider at the University of Wisconsin.  The tissue re-education phase  typically lasts 2-3 weeks in length with the following physiological goal:

Reset length tension in the tissues from the chronic position of sport

• Which sport?  Ice Hockey

• Which Position? The hockey position 

• Which contraction profile:  slow, sub max eccentrics and long isometric holds

• Re: Iso Holds: An important viscoelastic characteristic of tendons is creep: an increase in deformation over time under a constant load.  The goal is to shorten the muscle by contraction , while the tendon relaxes. 

• How much time?  According to Dr. Keith Barr, :30 second holds are the sweet spot. 

“For health or repair of an injured tendon, what we do is we use a very long isometric holds.  The reason we do that is because of that property that we talked about earlier which was that viscoelastic creep.  Creep in a tendon means if I pull it and hold it at a certain length, and I measure the tension between the two ends of the tendon, and I hold it there over time, what I’ll see is that the tension goes up really high when I pull it and it goes through this relaxation. It’s an exponential relaxation.  The relaxation kinda gets to the bottom where the tension is as low as possible around :30.  So, its about 45% of the tension within the tendon is released in the first :30. If I go out to 180 seconds, it only releases maybe 5% more of the tension.”   - Dr. Keith Barr (Episode 156 Just Fly Performance Podcast)

• Which anatomical Areas:  Hips, Shoulders, and ankles

Here is a look at our 2024 program tissue re-education program.  You can perform it as a 2-day/week program, or a 4-day/week program.  Once again, this is a heath-based program (not performance based) with the goal of resetting length tension of the system.