You're only as strong as your weakest link. It's an old cliché, but to someone who trains hard, it's very valid. Think about it: What is your weakest link? Is it the calves? The obliques? The traps?

Before you think of weak links in terms of muscle, consider this: If you exhaust a muscle, you can wait a day or so and then train it to the max again. Even if you tear a muscle, you can train around it while you wait a few weeks for it to heal. But, if you've got a weak or injured tendon or ligament, then you've really got problems. Connective tissue builds and heals slowly. A partial tear can take four or more months to heal; sometimes it never does. A complete tear will undoubtedly need surgery. Then you are looking at more than nine months of healing, plus atrophy in surrounding muscles because they can't be worked while adjacent connective tissue is recuperating from going under the knife.

In many obvious ways -- and some which are not so obvious -- your connective tissue is your weakest link. After all, muscle strength is limited by the ability of the tendon to handle the force generated by the muscle. And the muscle system is affected by the strength of the ligaments to stabilize the joints involved in the lift.

That's why building the muscles without conditioning the connective tissue leaves you open to injury, weakness and pain, which can turn chronic, limiting your range of motion. Common sense dictates a simple solution: Make the tendons and ligaments stronger. The question is how?

Like any aspect of bodybuilding, the answer requires knowledge of the basics. Without knowing how the body works, it is impossible to reach high and achieve your training goals. So, let's start with the most basic question: What are tendons and ligaments and how do they get stronger?

Every muscle has a tendon on each end that attaches the muscles to the bone. Tendons are made of thick, rubbery white tissue. Any kind of skeletal movement, from walking to lifting weights, happens because the muscle contracts and pulls on the tendon, which in turn pulls on the bone and moves it.

Ligaments are also attachment tissues; they connect one bone to another. They hold the joints together. Ligaments are thinner and less elastic than tendons. They also are white.

The whiteness of these tissues reveals the major reason for their slowness to grow and/or heal. Unlike the red, juicy muscle tissue, tendons and ligaments have very little blood supply. Even bones have more blood than connective tissue, which is why a broken bone can heal in four to six weeks, compared to nine months for tendons and ligaments.

This is because the bloodstream supplies the oxygen and nutrients needed for growth, repair and function. It flushes out waste products and toxins and carries them away. Obviously, getting the maximum possible blood supply into these tissues is a good idea.

Two kinds of vascularization are important in building the connective tissue. You may be familiar with one of them already: the "pump". When a muscle is contracted over and over again, it uses a lot of energy. In turn, it requires large and immediate amounts of oxygen and nutrients. Using energy also produces waste products that need to be quickly removed in order for the muscle to continue working.

The body responds by sending a greater supply of blood surging through the blood vessels of the muscle to feed it and flush it. You feel this as heat and swelling. But there's also another response and adaptation process: The vessels of that muscle will get bigger as you continue pumping it; new capillaries will start to branch out so that even more blood can be sent to the muscle. This greater blood supply allows the muscle to grow in response to training. The increased muscle mass creates the need for more blood supply, and the two adaptive processes complement each other right up to the limit of your genetic potential - or discipline, whichever comes first.

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