The most protective exercise is eccentric

and yet it's the one nobody is doing

This heals torn tendons, drops your blood pressure, and protects your joints — and a surgeon proved it on his own Achilles.

There is a doctor in Sweden who tried to snap his own Achilles tendon on purpose.

He was a surgeon. He knew exactly what he was doing.

And it turned into one of the most important accidents in the history of sports medicine.

I will tell you what he did in a minute.

First I want to tell you about a man I disagree with. A man I almost never disagree with.

Ray Peat.

If you have read me for any length of time, you know I have gotten a lot of my initial thinking from Ray Peat. The anti-seed-oil stuff. The pro-sugar, pro-dairy, pro-thyroid stuff. The man was one of the clearest thinkers about human metabolism who ever lived.

And Ray Peat did not like hard exercise.

He especially did not like one particular kind of movement. The kind where your muscle lengthens while it is fighting a load. Walking downhill. Lowering into a chair. Setting a heavy bag down slow.

He believed that kind of movement tears you up at the cellular level. Free radicals. Lactic acid. Stress hormones. Damage down to the DNA inside your muscle cells.

And here is the thing nobody wants to admit.

He was actually right.

The damage is real. You can measure it in the blood.

But that is only half the story.

And the half that is missing is the half that heals torn tendons, drops blood pressure, and armor-plates your joints against the fall that would otherwise break your hip.

About four years ago, perhaps because of some reckless supplementation experimenting, I started to get a very, very painful thumb and inner wrist. Eventually I went to an orthopedic surgeon, and he said that I had what’s called De Quervain’s tenosynovitis — an inflamed, swollen tendon sheath on the thumb side of the wrist.

I asked him what his recommendations were.

He said he had three.

He said they could just do a simple surgery, snip-snip, and I would be fine, or I could get physical therapy, or he could give me an injection of cortisone.

I’m not fond of cortisone injections because they actually degrade your connective tissue. They can literally break down the tendon over time, so they’re really not a good idea.

And I’m not fond of surgery. Not fond of surgery at all.

I asked one simple question. I said, “Dr. Smith, when you send somebody for physical therapy, how often do they come back and need your help?” He said they don’t come back.

Now here is where it gets interesting. I started to research things, and I found this one physical therapist guy. I guess he’s Korean but lives in Australia. He calls himself Mr. Physio, and he had exact exercises to fix this problem and many other problems too, all of them focusing on eccentric muscle strength.

He also warned against really bad physical therapists and showed exactly why their treatment recommendations were a big mistake that would make things worse.

As luck would have it, I had scheduled one of the approved physical therapists to come to my home and start showing me the exercises. When she came, she showed me the exact wrong exercises to do. I thanked her, paid her, and she left, and I started doing them the Mr. Physio way.

Within about six weeks, everything was completely fixed. The basic system of the exercises was to massage the trigger points away and then do these eccentric stretches, where you try to stretch with one hand but you oppose it with the other.

And you let the opposing hand “win.”

So after my experience with my thumb, and working with Mr. Physio (I engaged his help directly not just for the thumb but also for lower back issues...) here is what I have come to believe, after years of reading this research and doing it in my own body.

Eccentric exercise, in the right dose, is the single most protective and even curative form of exercise there is.

The small controlled damage is not the problem.

The small controlled damage is the medicine.

The gym crowd thinks soreness means they “earned it,” and grind themselves into hamburger chasing more of it. That’s wrong.

But many health purists think any soreness at all means your body being poisoned, and so they avoid the one movement that would save their knees. Or their shoulders. Or their thumbs.

Both are looking at the same thing. The damage. And both are reading it wrong.

Now, about that surgeon who purposely blew out his own Achilles tendon...

He had 15 patients. Every one of them was on a waiting list to get their Achilles cut open.

Every single one of them avoided the knife. With one cheap movement you can do on a staircase.

I will show you exactly what he did, and why it worked, below.

I will show you why lowering yourself down the stairs does more for your blood sugar than climbing them.

And I will show you the strangest finding of all — train one arm, and the other arm gets stronger too, without you touching it.

Ray Peat was half right. Let me show you the other half.

Quick disclaimer before we go further. I am not your doctor. This is not medical advice. If you have a torn tendon, or heart trouble, or you have been on the couch for ten years, talk to someone who can put hands on you before you start throwing yourself down staircases. This is me telling you what the research says and what I do. Nothing more.

Okay. On to the good stuff. And I hope you will kindly subscribe if you haven’t already.