04/05/2026
This is 100% why so many of our clients with chronic tendon pain had given up out of frustration before finding us to help guide their rehab process.
Tendinopathies and the boom-bust cycle.
You have a spike in activity over the course of a day, week, or month that contributes to an increase in symptoms. You decide to rest completely and your symptoms go away. Excellent! You recognize that you overdid it last time, so you don’t do quite as much this time around. However, you have a flare-up despite doing less of the same activity! You rest again until your pain goes away and repeat this process until your activity level is severely diminished.
This is not an uncommon cycle. It’s often driven by the belief that pain is bad and rest is good, while also using a reduction in pain as the primary metric for success.
But that’s not the way to approach tendinopathy because rehab can take 3 months, 6 months, or even a year or longer. Symptoms will fluctuate on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis, which is why your focus should be on function while monitoring pain to guide the appropriate amount of physical activity.
An increase in function will not always correlate with a linear decrease in pain. If you go from running 1 mile with a 3/10 pain to running 3 miles with a 3/10 pain over the course of 3 months, that’s actually significant progress. The pain may seem like it’s staying the same, but technically it’s getting better because it requires more activity to reach the same level of pain that you initially experienced.
To learn more, click the link in our bio or search “E3 Rehab Tendon Rehab” on YouTube!
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