The calls Sterka's engine makes, with the arithmetic shown.
Muscle recovery time is not one number. Sterka tracks it per muscle, each on its own half-life, because a single whole-body readiness score cannot tell a cooked chest from fresh legs.
The 5/3/1 program mapped part by part onto Sterka's engine: the 90% training max, the four-week wave, the AMRAP set that sets your next training max — or the fixed single that replaces it where near-max work is held back — the ×0.9 reset, and the four reads a spreadsheet has no way to make.
How long you rest between sets is set by your goal, by whether the lift is a compound or an isolation, and by the load actually on the bar.
A deload week cuts your working sets to roughly half. On the wave's scheduled week the load comes down with them; on a plateau, cadence or on-demand deload, the weight stays exactly where it was.
Rate a month of sessions as easy, flag a muscle as still fried, and next week arrives unchanged. That is not a bug. Here is what an engine that reads your logged sets has to do instead.
On the Get Stronger goal, the peak of an intensity block's four-week wave is a 1+ AMRAP at 95% of a deliberately conservative Training Max — or a fixed heavy single where near-max work is held back. A calibration rep, not a one-rep-max test.
The strength Training Max is seeded at 90% of an already-conservative estimated 1RM — a deliberate double discount, so the week-3 peak lands in a productive zone instead of a number you cannot move: a 1+ AMRAP at 95% of that Max, or a fixed heavy single where near-max work is held back.