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My scumbag achilles...
Tendons are weird. Stupid and weird. And nobody knows shit about how to fix them.
Early in the summer, I strained my achilles playing soccer. I am old and this has happened before many times. This time I decided to GO HAM on my achilles. I adopted a strict stretching and eccentric exercise protocol. The sort that physical therapists have recommended in the past. I was 100% consistent and spent about 20 minutes each day. I did this for MONTHS. Did my achilles get better? Kinda, sorta, not really.
So I stopped doing the program. And I kept playing soccer. And the achilles pain sort of just... went away. It's completely gone now.
The only thing that changed was I switched to a low carb diet. GPT-4 tells me there is no evidence that this related.
One day, science will figure tendons out. We're a long way from that now. In the mean time, for those with nagging sports injuries, I advise not wasting your money on doctors and PT unless someone else is paying for it.
This probably depends on exactly what we mean by "no evidence". While I am not aware of any RCT-style evidence for this, there's quite a bit of anecdata and a plausible-enough mechanism that I wouldn't be all that surprised if many people experience less joint or tendon pain with lower inflammation diets. As ever in the world of sports and nutrition, I think there's a good chance that there's so much individual variability in responses and difficult to control for differences that you'd need an impractically large study to have enough power to figure out whether there's good empirical evidence for this sort of thing, but if it seems like it works individually, who cares?
For me it's an N of 1 so I can't really say. And my achilles pain has gone away in the past without diet changes.
But I just did some more searching, and it appears that a low carb diet could improve tendon health after all.
Specifically, there is a link between diabetes and tendon health. A high sugar diet leads to production of AGEs which cause tendon problems as well as other, more serious problems.
Perhaps a low-carb diet isn't necessary. But the standard American diet has so much sugar that something like 10% of the population is diabetic, and another 38% with pre-diabetes. I have to imagine that this could impact tendons.
GPT-4 let me down.
Yeah, like you said, these kind of injuries or pains just seem so absolutely flukey that it feels like pure guesswork trying to get rid of them or prevent them. Personally, I've had that with IT band issues in running. In principle, I know that these tend to be from weak glutes and/or hip flexors, but that still doesn't help me understand when and why it becomes a problem. I've rolled through training months with consistent 60-70 mile weeks and zero pain only to wind up on the shelf from much less, much lower intensity work later in the year. Why? Well, if I knew, I would do something about it.
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