>>76523144
I'm in my 30's too and I don't have any pain or discomfort on any of my joints while training close to failure with heavy loads(80%+ of 1RM) even training muscles multiple times a week.
I experimented with high volumes years back and I did start to feel pain around the bicep tendon but I just dropped volume a ton and it went away.
I find that people that have tendon pain tend to have very high volume training backgrounds which leaves them with lingering tendon/cartilage damage and they "feel" like light-load high rep work helps with the pain, but I bet that does absolutely nothing for tendon stiffness or tendon damage recovery and in fact it just wears your tendons out even more.
I don't have a source for this, it's just what I find to be the case from training with dozens of people with such problems, they never get tendon pain just from training heavy, there's always something in the past that they used to do which was excessive in volume and it's just that training heavy after the fact just exposes that damage.
>Last time I got tendinitis all over, from squat and bench
You don't have to do those exercises if they hurt your knees/back/shoulders.
If your pec tendon attaching to the shoulder is what hurts in a bench consider doing a close grip bench or just use machines that alleviate the stretched position somewhat.
If squats hurt your knees try to focus on the muscles behind the kneecap, maybe you have some severe muscle imbalance.

Idk just some thoughts.
>On a whim I deloaded and started doing 20 rep sets
If you go to failure on those you will still stimulate growth and even strength, it's just that it will be less efficient and harder to recover from.
You will probably have to do less sets than the average person to compensate for the harder recovery.

But if that's really the only way you can train then keep doing it, pretend I never said anything, motivation+consistency matters.