Did you know that muscles can recover from strain in just 1–3 days, but ligaments (the connective tissues) take weeks? 5-6 times longer.
This means that if you push your muscles to grow too fast, they can outpace what your ligaments are ready to support.
The result:
- You can run fast, but risk injury when you change directions.
- You have strength & tone on the outside, but vulnerability on the inside.
The antidote isn’t just slowing down, but supplementing your training:
- Cross-training to balance supporting muscles & reduce ligament strain.
- Mobility and stability drills to improve joint integrity.
- Eccentric training (slow lengthening) to strengthen tendons.
The same thing happens in growing companies.
You build a great product or do excellent work. Demand grows. Opportunities multiply. Pressure mounts to say yes to more projects so you can keep scaling.
But unless you build the support structure alongside it — systems for decision-making, norms for escalation, and integrating new hires — the growth becomes unbalanced.
The “visible muscles” (new projects, new revenue, new hires) keep getting stronger. But the “ligaments” (decision scaffolding, communication patterns, leadership capacity) lag behind.
The result?
- Senior staff bottlenecks.
- Decisions stalling.
- Urgent work crowding out important work.
- Rework, churn and slipping quality.
On the surface, the business is stronger than ever. But the underlying imbalance makes the whole system more fragile.
Visible strength with hidden weakness is not resilience.
The solution isn’t slowing down, but building differently:
- Frameworks so decisions happen at the right level.
- Feedback that builds autonomy, not dependence.
- Leaders who develop their team instead of carrying them.
Where in your work is growth outpacing the scaffolding that supports it?
And what’s one ligament you need to strengthen before pushing for more muscle?
