Abstract:

BACKGROUND: Tendon morphological structure is related to biomechanics, which affects exercise performance and incidence of tendon lesions.
OBJECTIVE: To summarize the recent researches on the tendon hypertrophy, and to provide a theoretical basis for the study of tendon adaptation to exercise. The tendon in the paper is free tendon without symptoms.
METHODS: PubMed database and CNKI database were searched for documents from related to morphology changes of tendon and collagen metabolism in tendon extracellular matrix following exercise training from 1980 to January 2010. 
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: A total of 37 literatures were analyzed. More researches suggest exercise results in tendon region-specific hypertrophy, which is primarily related to the age and workload. Tendon region-specific hypertrophy is more likely to produce when exercise start from growth, and may need relatively high intensity and long duration. The mechanism may be the high collagen turnover in response to exercise, which results in the change of tendon fibril quantity and diameter.