Isochain Prometheus Week 5: Back feeling much better

 I didn't get much sleep last night because of the lingering soreness from yesterday's Deadlift practice with the Isochain.  I spent some of the time in bed rereading my copy of Beyond Bodybuilding by Pavel Tsatsoline.  I came across a passage in the book, entitled "Jurassic Training Revisited: Building Tendon and Ligament Strength".  Here, Pavel mentions George Jowett teaching John Grimek that "support holds" (isometrics) will strengthen ligaments and tendons.  Then, Pavel says that  "high-rep work" is the other half of the connective tissue training equation. and refers to his other book Super Joints for details on the high-rep movements.  Super Joints mentions Amosov's joint health routine that included a lot of squats and pushups, then presents Pavel's alternative to the Amosov routine, which are joint mobility exercises.    

The information on Amosov's routine came from the writings of Thomas Kurz.  I searched a bit and found clarification from Kurz himself which states that the purpose of high-rep work, with low resistance, is vascularization of the tendons, so that they are less prone to inflammation and rupture.

So in my case, doing a 100 pushups a day on the floor is not going to strengthen my tendons/ligaments, because for me that is not "low resistance".   That many pushups a day would probably have the opposite effect - damage to those connective tissues via overuse injury.

Anyway, when I got out of bed in the morning, the back was sore and stiff as expected but still not as terrible as when I had my back spasm a few years ago.  I began the day practicing I could remember of the updated GMB Elements warmup routine - a couple of quadraped drills - one for shoulders/scapula, the other for spine, as well as hip mobility with gentle low back stretching.  Then I did the Convict Conditioning Trifecta, with a lot of short sets of N-Holds interspersed with sets of Bridge, Twist, and one "bonus" drill - middle split stretch.  After this morning routine, the back was still a little sore, but not as stiff and sore as when I got out of bed.

For the rest of the day, I occasionally got up, and did the following randomly chosen drills:

2 sets of 15 bodyweight squats

10 minutes of zhan zhuang (standing pole jin practice)

Silk-reeling derived hand-turning drills with a hammer, practicing using the 6H suit to rotate the hammer from horizontal to vertical instead of just turning the forearm with localized muscle.  I tried to do at least 10 reps per hand, per set, per position (closed to open, and open to close).

Silk reeling exercises empty hand

Hip rotation varations

 Later in the evening the back felt much, much better.  That gave me the confidence to reorganize my Promethean spreadsheet to plan out the warmup loads for my modified Promethean program which will focus on Hack Lift instead of Deadlift, Reverse Curl instead of Curl, and Shoulder Press.