Tendons

Anatomical background, not a Yiquan term

The tendon connects muscle to bone; exceptions are intermediate tendons between two muscle bellies and attachments to fascia. It consists of collagenous fibres — mainly collagen type I — in dense connective tissue. Flat muscles end in aponeuroses, others in cord-like tendons; the Achilles tendon withstands over a tonne of tensile load.

As with fascia: this is background, not doctrine. Two findings, however, bear directly on training.

First: they are not four separate things

Tendons can also attach to fascia, and both consist primarily of collagen type I — as does bone, for 95 percent of its organic substance. This gives the tissue continuum customary in Yiquan — “skin, flesh, sinews, bone” — a material basis.

These are not four separate materials but differently condensed forms of the same one. The classical enumeration therefore describes not categories but a gradient.

Second: tendons regenerate poorly

Tendons contain few nerves and blood vessels, from which a poor capacity for regeneration follows. Tendon tissue forgives overload less readily than muscle does.

This is the practically most important point on this page. The slowness emphasised throughout Yiquan — slow and fine, no haste — and the warning against forced practice are therefore not a matter of style, nor a test of patience. They have a concrete basis in the tissue: what is being trained here builds more slowly, and heals more slowly, than what one first feels in training.