Philip Pape: 0:01

If you're like me, you love to get new PRs, you love to crush those lifts, continue making progress session after session. But lately there's been a nagging pain in your elbow, maybe your shoulder, maybe your knee. You brush it off, thinking that's just part of the process, but what if I told you that ignoring these signs could lead to a catastrophic injury? There's an engineering principle called fatigue failure that explains why materials break under repeated stress and guess what? Your tendons follow the same rules. Today, we're diving into how understanding fatigue failure could be the key to preventing nagging injuries and ensuring longevity in your strength training journey. If you're someone who loves to lift, and especially loves to lift heavy, this episode could save your tendons and your progress. Let's engineer a better approach to tendon health.

Philip Pape: 1:00

Welcome to Wits and Weights, the podcast that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique. I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we're exploring the engineering concept of fatigue failure. This episode is about keeping your tendons healthy and your lifts progressing. We're gonna break down the components of fatigue failure and see how they directly apply to your tendons during strength training so that you can keep showing up session after session for years and enjoy the process. And, as always, if you're enjoying the show, if you want more content like this that applies these concepts to your fitness, your health, your nutrition, hit the follow button right now. If you're not already following the show, if you just downloaded this one episode for the first time, take a look at the back catalog, subscribe, follow if you like the episode, so that you get notified of future episodes. And right now, when it comes to Apple and Spotify, that's one of the best ways that others can find the show. So go ahead and hit follow and let's jump right into today's episode.

Philip Pape: 2:07

I wanna start by breaking down what fatigue failure actually means in engineering, and then we're gonna quickly apply that to your training. In simple terms, it is the weakening of a material due to repeatedly applied loads. Now, this doesn't happen all at once. It's a gradual process that occurs in stages, and that's where things get interesting for us as lifters, because our body is physical system that includes these special tissue called tendons, and this is really where this process applies. So the four components of fatigue failure in engineering are cyclic stress, crack initiation, crack propagation and final failure. So let's break it down. The first one is cyclic stress. Now, in engineering this refers to repeated loading and unloading cycles In strength training.

Philip Pape: 3:01

Every rep of a heavy lift so every rep of a bench press, let's say, or a squat, is a cycle of stress on our tendons. I want you to think about those heavy singles in that lift, right? That heavy deadlift, that heavy overhead press. Each one is putting significant stress on your tendons, your tendons. The second component is crack initiation In materials. This is where tiny cracks form at stress points. Now, for our tendons, this is the microtrauma that occurs with each heavy lift. It's totally normal, right? This is when you hear about muscles breaking down and experiencing micro tears. This is normal, it's part of the adaptation process. But you have to understand that this is one of the steps along the way.

Philip Pape: 3:47

The third one is crack propagation. This is where those initial tiny cracks grow larger under continued stress. Now in our tendons, this is what happens when we don't allow for proper recovery. Those micro tears start to accumulate and grow. Recovery those micro tears start to accumulate and grow and that leads us to final failure In engineering.

Philip Pape: 4:08

This is where the material can no longer support the load and then it breaks. For our tendons, this is when a major injury can occur, like tendonitis or, unfortunately, what I had, which was a rotator cuff tear, a tendon rupture. Now here's where it gets really interesting, because in engineering there's a concept called fatigue limit or endurance limit, and this is the stress level below which the failure will not occur, no matter how many times the load is applied. So, for our tendons, think of this as the sweet spot of training intensity and volume right, your stimulus that allows for progress but without risking injury. And you might have heard of concepts like stimulus to fatigue. You might have heard of the fitness curve, stress, recovery, adaptation. They all kind of play on this principle of finding balance between the intensity side, where you're actually doing something physical and putting the load on your body, and the recovery side, which, let's be honest, many of us do not pay as much attention to or give enough credence to pay as much attention to or give enough credence to.

Philip Pape: 5:14

So if we want to apply this knowledge practically to our training, I'm going to give you a few strategies here that I think are helpful. The first one is we want to prevent overloading. Now you might say, well, don't you talk about progressive overload all the time? Well, progressive overload is a misnomer. We're not actually overloading. We're simply loading up to an appropriate stress to cause an adaptation. So just as engineers design structures like bridges and buildings to avoid excessive cyclic loading, we need to be careful with our training loads.

Philip Pape: 5:46

But it does mean being smart about progressive overload and thinking about things like okay, I'm not gonna necessarily go for a one RM every session or I'm gonna cycle through different lifts as I test my one RMs, like in, for example, the Westside method. Or instead of hitting one RMs, I'm gonna do doubles, triples, triples or even fives. Still hit it hard, still get close to failure, but it's not that high end. You know 90%, 95% of my maximum load. So there's there's ways to kind of balance this out and I've experienced myself with my shoulder rehab that when I really push for singles or doubles, there's a lot of stress on the tendon. I know it's there. Or doubles, there's a lot of stress on the tendon, I know it's there. I can hear some of the grinding. I get some of the pain if I overdo it and that's my body telling me that those are probably not appropriate for me. If you're still in a healthy state, you haven't gone through that yet. It's good to be proactive and get ahead of that. So preventing overloading just by balancing the intensity is a good strategy.

Philip Pape: 6:55

The second strategy is, of course, allow for recovery. In engineering, materials need rest periods between these stress cycles. For us this means adequate rest between your heavy lifting sessions. That's it. That's really what it means. It also means strategic deloads right Using deload weeks where necessary. Now, a deload isn't let me just take the week off A deload is okay. If I normally train four days a week, maybe I'm still going to go in four days, but I'm going to drop a little bit of the intensity and cut out some sets or exercises to reduce the volume. Or maybe it means I'm going to go from four days normally down to just two days this week and sort of compress into some smaller full body sessions, something like that, where you're basically giving yourself a chance to, you know, fully heal up and recover before you get back to the next cycle of, say, six weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks, whatever.

Philip Pape: 7:48

The third principle here, or strategy, is to monitor for signs of fatigue, is to monitor for signs of fatigue. So if you listen to my episode about experimentation and prototyping, you know engineers use non-destructive testing to detect early signs of fatigue. So they do things that don't push the material to their limit but still push them enough to kind of get data. So, for us lifters, this means paying attention to our bodies. Okay, I don't know if you hear my my dog's barking, but they're paying attention to something. Anyway, paying attention to our bodies, right, that slight twinge in your elbow, that little bit of a spring when you do your bench press and it gets to that one part of the bench press, you know what I'm talking about. That little bit of a click in your shoulder, that little bit of a crack in your knee, right, don't ignore those. Sometimes they're okay, sometimes they're early warning signs of, you know, impending tendon issues. I've gotten very in tune with that with my shoulder, and you may be familiar with that as well, but we don't want to push through that and push to the full fatigue point, right.

Philip Pape: 8:52

And then number four is maintenance and repair. So, just like structures undergo regular maintenance, we need to take care of our tendons. What does that mean? This means proper nutrition, so not always being in a fat loss phase and not always cutting, especially if you're having some pain, if you're having some fatigue, if you're pushing it really hard. If you're trying to build muscle, you need to be fully fueled up, have enough calories, enough energy, enough carbs to support your tendons. You know, when I get into a period where I need to do some extra rehab, I decide to go into a maintenance phase so that nutrition is out of the equation. This means staying hydrated.

Philip Pape: 9:29

This means, if you need to loosen up a bit, if you need to do some stretching before jumping into a movement, do it right. Some of us, you know we got the really tight shoulders or elbows. We're trying to do a back squat, like a low bar back squat, and you're just not able to get in there fully in one shot. So you can stretch into it right, get under the bar and just kind of stretch to that point where it becomes uncomfortable back off. Do it again back off and sort of ease into it just like any other stretching work. And you may decide to incorporate regular periods of, say, five or 10 minutes of stretching a certain body part to keep it limber and loose, and it's perfectly fine, there's nothing wrong with that. Things like massage, right Physical therapy all those may be in the cards for you, depending on what state you're in. So prevent overload, allow for recovery, monitor for signs of fatigue by paying attention to your body and give yourself some love in the nutrition and the stress and the other parts of your life. So here's a thought that might shift your perspective right.

Philip Pape: 10:30

In engineering, fatigue failure is not a flaw. It's actually a natural process that has to be accounted for when you design the part or design the product. What if we approach our training the same way? Instead of seeing tendon pain or injuries as failures or setbacks, we view them as valuable data points. They are telling us something about our design, right? When I hear people say, well, I got a cortisone shot for this, or I got some, you know, I took some meds or some rest and they're not addressing the actual root cause, that's a red flag, right, because you haven't fixed the design. You're actually putting a band-aid on the situation. Sometimes a cortisone shot can relieve a symptom that allows you to improve the design. Or if the design was correct and you're applying it in a context that has pain or inflammation, even a good design can fail right. So there's context and nuance here.

Philip Pape: 11:30

But when you look at your training and your recovery strategies, and then especially your form and technique. Those are the things that are part of your design right and listening to your body signals and adjusting those things so that, when you're healthy, you're not exacerbating and furthering the injury You're, you're getting back to the root cause and fixing it. That's a very nice place to be and this is a mindset shift from you know, pushing through pain to I'm designing my body for longevity. I'm designing it for longevity. And when you're 20, when you're 25, your body's so resilient you don't notice these things. They will start to accumulate. So get ahead of it as early as you can.

Philip Pape: 12:09

It really isn't about lifting the heaviest possible weight all the time, right, but finding the optimal balance of that intensity and that stress and recovery that allows for continuously improving without you breaking down. All right. So as we wrap up, remember this your tendons, your tendons are like the materials engineers work with. Right, they have limits. They have limits. They're physical materials, they're mechanical materials. But when you understand the limits, it doesn't mean you restrict your progress. It means you can optimize your approach for those.

Philip Pape: 12:44

So, when you're looking at your training session right now, when you're thinking about how you're training, how are you going to go to the gym tomorrow and next week, whether it's a three-day full body, a four-day split, a six-day bodybuilding program. Ask yourself, am I designing for just pushing it all out, to get short-term PRs, or am I designing to continue making progress, get strong, get jacked, get swole, but also have long-term durability right? It's not mutually exclusive. I mean pushing all out all the time is, but I'm saying getting the result is not exclusive with getting durability right. Am I listening to the early warning signs or am I pushing until something breaks? And that's where applying the concept of fatigue failure to your training is a very smart way to go.

Philip Pape: 13:29

All right, if you found value in today's episode, as always, do me a favor and share it with a lifting buddy who's been pushing a little too hard, or who loves to hit PRs all the time, or that guy or that woman who talks about their shoulder, their knee, their elbow right, and let them know about this episode and just to think about it a little bit differently. And of course, they could always reach out to talk specifics. I'm happy to talk about modifications for their training, food, other approaches, other types of programming and so on. And then again, don't forget to hit follow if you haven't already, because your support helps us reach more people. Until next time, keep using your wits, keep lifting those weights and remember, in training as in engineering, sustainability. And remember, in training as in engineering sustainability, longevity is about smart design and listening to the feedback and the data. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.