Rest helps. Until it doesn’t.
That’s the cycle, right? Your elbow — or shoulder, or Achilles — flares up. You back off for a couple of weeks. It calms down. You go back to normal life, and within days it’s barking again. So you rest longer this time. Same result. At some point it stops feeling like an injury and starts feeling like a permanent negotiation.
Tendons connect muscle to bone, and they hate sudden changes in load. A new workout routine. A weekend of yard work after a quiet winter. Hours of gripping, typing, or throwing. The tendon gets irritated faster than it can adapt, and because tendons have poor blood supply, they recover slowly and grumpily. Anti-inflammatories quiet it temporarily. They don’t fix why it keeps happening.
What tendonitis can feel like:
- Aching or burning at the tendon — elbow, shoulder, knee, or Achilles
- Pain that ramps up during activity and throbs afterward
- Stiffness when starting movement that eases, then returns
- Tenderness when you press on the spot
- Weakness in the grip or the affected joint
- A cycle of improvement with rest, then flare-ups when active again
Here’s what most people miss: the problem usually isn’t just the tendon. It’s the mechanics around it — a stiff joint above or below forcing the tendon to do extra work, weak supporting muscles, or a movement pattern that’s been off for years. Rest calms the symptom. It doesn’t touch any of that. Which is why the pain keeps coming back.
We treat the whole picture. Muscle release work and instrument-assisted soft tissue techniques break up the irritated, stuck tissue in and around the tendon. Cold laser therapy helps stubborn cases — tendons respond well to it precisely because their blood supply is poor. Kinesiology taping can offload the area while you stay active. And rehab is the long game: progressive loading exercises that rebuild the tendon’s capacity so it stops flaring every time life gets busy.
If any of that sounds familiar, come in and let us take a look. We’ll evaluate you thoroughly, tell you straight what we find, and be honest about whether we think we can help. Call our Mt. Lebanon office at (412) 341-2505 or McMurray at (412) 444-8455 — or book online anytime.
Usually a sudden increase in load — a new sport, more hours at a task, a burst of yard work — on a tendon that wasn’t ready for it. Underlying mechanics matter too: stiff neighboring joints and weak supporting muscles force tendons to absorb more stress than they should.
Because rest only calms the irritation; it doesn’t fix the mechanics that caused it. Until the stiff joints, weak muscles, or faulty movement patterns get addressed — and the tendon gets progressively reloaded — the cycle repeats every time activity ramps up.
Conservatively, in most cases: soft tissue work to restore the tendon and surrounding tissue, cold laser to support healing, taping to offload it during activity, and progressive loading exercises that rebuild its capacity. Surgery is rarely needed and only for cases that fail months of good conservative care.
Tendons heal slowly — think weeks to a few months, not days. You’ll usually feel meaningful improvement well before it’s fully resolved. The rehab phase matters most; rushing back to full activity too soon is how relapses happen.
We find the irritated tendon, then look past it — checking the joints above and below, your strength, and how you move — to find why that tendon is overloaded. You get a clear explanation and a plan that treats the cause, not just the sore spot.