Tendon Burn Count: Start of Week 6

I decided to change my Zercher Lunge training from focusing on tendon stress relaxation to focusing more on muscular strength.

One reason is my Tendon Burn Count sessions have been taking about an hour.

The main reason is it has taken me 4 weeks to build up to a consistent hold time of at least 30 seconds in the desired Zercher Lunge position, which is as low as I could comfortably get within my flexibility limits. Tendon stress relaxation requires a 30-second hold with at least 70% of maximum voluntary effort or 1-rep max force. My Zercher Lunge 1-rep max was 70lbs, so the minimum required force was 49lbs, which is 70% of 70lbs. I wasn't able to sustain 49lbs of force at the desired position for the full 30s at the start of Tendon Burn Count. So, I decided to drop the target load to from 49lbs to 20lbs and focus on working up to a 30s hold at the targeted position. After achieving a 30s hold, then I would increase the target load until I got to 49lbs. It took me 2 weeks to achieve the 30s hold at a target load of 20lbs. It took another 2 weeks to work up to a target load of 26lbs while still holding for 30s. I don't know how many more weeks it will take to work up to 30s at 49lbs to finally stimulate tendon stress relaxation and thus reap whatever tendon strength gains could be had from Zercher Lunge. By the time I reach that point, I'll be past the half way point of the 12 weeks I've allocated for Tendon Burn Count. Thus, I decided to do the Zercher Lunge for muscular strength instead of tendon strength.
I retested my Zercher Lunge 1-rep max, in case the training I'd done to date had resulted in any strength gain. As it turned out my 1-rep max increasedf from 70 lbs to 85.4 lbs!

I made another change, which was to lower the Overhead Press target load from 49 lbs. to 47 lbs. This was to correct a basic misreading of my 1-rep max data. The 49 lbs. was the calculated 70% 1RM for Zercher Lunge. The 70% 1RM target load for Overhead Press is actually 47lbs.