The Importance of Deload Weeks
Today we are going to talk about the importance of deload weeks. Now of course before we can do that, we have to define what a deload week actually is.
A deload week is a week of training where you still go to the gym to workout, but the intensity and volume of your workouts are easier to manage. It’s essentially a scheduled reduction in the total intensity and/or volume of your workouts.
Today we will cover why you should implement a deload and how to implement a deload based on your training age.
The reason I want to talk about this today is because so many new athletes always ask me why they need to implement a deload and that they are used to going balls to the wall every single week. The idea of periodically taking it easy for an entire week can be a tough concept for a lot of people to accept. But the overall importance of periodically taking it easy is completely necessary if you want to have a long training career in a pain free matter.
Deloads are useful after a training block to reduce accumulated fatigue, promote recovery and promote positive training adaptations.
Which leads me into why you want to implement deload weeks.
There are several reasons, but a few that come to mind are:
1. They help reduce the risk of overuse injuries
2. They help break through training plateaus
3. They mitigate underperformance and workout burnout
Let’s go over these reasons in detail. Firstly, why would we want to reduce the risk of overuse injuries? Most people think they are invincible and believe that injuries won’t happen to them. Until it does, and believe me, it’s not fun. Even if we implement the correct protocols of warming up, stretching, lifting correctly, prioritizing our cool down, and getting in protein after our training sessions – we are still at risk of injuring ourselves simply from overuse injury.
Now to some, overuse injuries may not sound that bad. “so what, a few aches and pains here and there. I can handle that and power through. No pain no gain, right?”
Before you fully believe a statement like that, let’s look at the effects and timeline that often occur during the different stages of an ignored overuse injury.
Stage one is acute fatigue, which often lasts a couple of days. The negative effects are typically nothing more than altered neuron function. Neurons are nerve cells responsible for receiving sensory input and sending motor commands to our muscles. So, if these neurons stop sending commands to our muscles as efficiently as we want when we are training, you should be able to imagine how that will impact our training and performance over time.
The next stage is known as functional overreaching. This is when an athlete undertakes excessive training that leads to a short-term decline in performance, where recovery takes a few days or weeks of rest. The negative effects at this stage involves altered motor unit recruitment and altered sympathetic activity. Without getting too much into the complexity of it, motor unit recruitment is how many motor neurons are activated in a particular muscle when exercising. If this number starts to go down because you are at this stage of overtraining, it can mitigate muscle growth, not something we want of course. The sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for the “fight or flight,” which is extremely important during exercise. Therefore, this is not really something we want altered.
I should note for any powerlifters listening that this stage is also known as the overreaching stage, where the programming for this sport does strategically bring you to this stage as an attempt to peak for a powerlifting meet, where you taper off after reaching this stage. But for the average gym goer it’s not necessary to try to implement this type of overreaching, as it can be quite detrimental if it is mismanaged.
The next stage is non-functional overreaching, which can require rest for weeks to months. This stage leads to a decrease in performance, muscle glycogen, increased resting heart rate, blood pressure and disturbances to your immune function, hormonal concentrations and overall mood.
The last stage is overtraining syndrome, which is caused by prolonged chronic overtraining, without the necessary recovery and can last many months to years. In addition to the negative effects previously mentioned, it also causes increased risk of sickness, infection and disturbances to one’s emotions and sleep. This is worst-case scenario and needs to be taken very seriously.
This isn’t meant to scare anyone away from lifting weights. In fact, resistance training is one of the safest activities one can perform. But we do want to implement the appropriate measures of being proactive and giving our bodies time to rest, recover and adapt versus being reactive to a sudden injury. Trust me, it’s better to be proactive than reactive.
The next reason as to why you want to implement a deload week is because they help break through training plateaus. Deloads actually help promote positive training adaptations. What happens here is prior to implementing a deload week, let’s say it’s a 4-week training block and on the 5th week you take your deload week. During those first 4 weeks, you are pushing yourself in the gym, where week after week your fitness levels are going up and you are getting stronger and stronger.
Something else that is happening during those 4 weeks is that you are accumulating stress and fatigue. Even though you might not feel fatigued, it’s still accumulating, where that increase in your fitness levels is only going to go up for so long before we start to see an inverse effect and your fitness levels start to go down. This is due to the accumulated fatigue.
At the end of the day, we can only push ourselves and go balls to the wall for so long, where your body is eventually going to be like “ok, that’s enough, I need a break.” The accumulated fatigue and implementation of a deload week allows you to achieve what is known as supercompensation. This is just a fancy word for adaptation, which means that our muscle tissue recovers, and these strength levels will increase to levels above baseline.
Basically, this means that when you provide your body a stressor (exercise) then you remove that stressor (lift lighter during the deload) then your body adapts to deal with the stressor again in the future. So, say the stressor is back squats, where by the end of the 4 weeks, you can barely squat 3 sets of 8 at 135lbs. Then you implement a deload week and reduce your intensity to say 3 sets of 8 at 95lbs. In theory, the next training block after your deload week doing 3 sets of 8 at 135lbs would feel easier or you would be able to lift even heavier. That is supercompensation.
By allowing your body to recover after the stress you placed on it, it becomes better at dealing with that stressor in the future. Whereas if you just try to push and push and push week after week after week, you are missing out on potential strength gains and the benefits of supercompensation.
And the last reason as to why you want to implement deload weeks is because they mitigate underperformance. Listen, I don’t care how long you have been lifting weights, there is always room for improvements. There’s always a slight change or tweak you can make to your foot placement when you bench press, or your ankle mobility or breathing technique during squats. Whatever it may be, we can always make improvements to our form and technique. But how can we make those improvements if each week we are trying to push ourselves harder than the previous week? At some point, our technique can start to break down as a way to compensate to keep lifting more.
By taking a step back and reducing how much weight is on the bar every once in a while. It allows us that time we need to make these necessary changes and tweaks, which will of course allow us to better perform with more weight on the bar in the future.
So, keep in mind, that a deload week is not a free week off the gym. You still have to show up, put in the work and pretend like there’s still heavy weight on the bar. Take it as an opportunity to slow things down and strive to make improvements and constantly focus on perfecting your technique.
Hopefully I have gotten my point across as to why deloads are so important. So now let’s talk about how to actually implement a deload week.
It’s important to note that one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to how and when to implement deload weeks. But I definitely recommend planning your deload week ahead of time and again, being proactive versus reactive.
A good recommendation is to implement a deload week every 4-8 weeks. If you are a new lifter, so lifting anytime less than 2 months, a deload every 6-8 weeks is necessary. As you move towards intermediate or advanced (so if you’ve been lifting longer than 2 months), a deload week every 4-6 weeks is necessary. Now for some of clients who are listening, you already know that I assign deloads every 4 weeks, even if you are a new lifter. And the reason I do this is because I do notice that most of my clients express a lot of fatigue within that timeframe, where they look forward to the deload week. So, I have found 4 weeks to an optimal time. But if you are doing your own programming and know that you can implement one every 6 weeks, there’s nothing wrong with that.
There’s no one size fits all.
Now that you know how often to implement a deload week, the next order of business is how much should you be lifting? And there are two ways you can reduce your overall load, depending on how your program is built
The first method is to reduce your intensity by 10%. So, if your programming is percentage based, I would simply reduce your intensity down by 10%. For example, if you finish your training block at 85%, your deload intensity would be 75%.
The next method is to reduce your RPE from 8/9 to 6. So, if your programming is RPE based, I would simply reduce your intensity down to an RPE 6.
If your programming isn’t percentage based or RPE based, I would definitely recommend trying to implement an RPE based program. This just allows you to gauge how much you are lifting so you know how to effectively reduce your load as needed to have a successful deload week.
Let’s quickly go over what RPE is.
The Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) scale is a numerical measurement of how hard exercise feels. The RPE scale is how you gauge how much you should be lifting! We typically want to be lifting at an RPE 8. This is where you should gauge to be lifting enough where by the end of the prescribed reps, you only feel like you have 2 more reps in the tank — meaning you couldn’t lift more than 2 more reps at that particular weight.
So, if for the first exercise, say it’s bicep curls for 4 sets of 8 reps and you decide to lift 15lbs. If you can lift way more than 8 reps at 15lbs, you aren’t lifting heavy enough so you should try using 20lbs, or however much you feel is necessary where by the end of 8 reps you only have energy to do no more than 2 more reps. IF you feel like you can push another 4+ reps at that weight, you aren’t lifting heavy enough.
It allows you to gauge progress over time in the gym. RPE 8 is considered to be reasonably challenging where you SHOULD have two more reps left in the tank.
When we implement a deload week, operating at an RPE 6 is recommended, where it feels like you have around 4 reps left in the tank. Overall, the RPE scale allows you to gauge how much you should be lifting.
So overall, deload weeks are extremely important. I understand it’s a tough mindset for some people to break because they are so used to constantly pushing themselves. But we have to remember that our bodies can only do so much, and we can’t fight our bodies by constantly driving them into the ground until we can’t take no more. It’s time we start to normalize the importance of rest and recovery because that’s often the missing component to unlocking your true potential to achieve your fitness goals.
Hope this was helpful!
Coach Krysten