If you’ve been following our content for a while, you’ll know that we have spoken a lot to the fact that both Andrew and I did a ton of things wrong for a long time in our early twenties.
In fact, that’s a huge reason why we both have become so passionate about fitness and doing things the “right” way; so we started a business to try and help others avoid the same wasteful journey that we took.
When we didn’t know any better (i.e. we weren’t tracking our lifts efficiently, tracking calories, practicing effective recovery, etc.) we both encountered the strange phenomenon of what I’ll dub, “a week at home with Mom’s cooking.”
We would travel back home to our parents’ houses over holiday breaks and random weekends here and there, not lift while at home, and eat loads of great food.
When we would return to the bachelor pad, one of the first things we wanted to do was get a solid lift in like a couple of bros.
I kid you not, during every single one of those lifting sessions back from “a week at home with Mom’s cooking,” we felt like superheroes.
We would be putting up bigger numbers than we were hitting previously (albeit for only a few sessions because we were boneheads), and we thought that we were invoking some kind of magic power divined from middle-aged Midwestern women’s cooking.
What we were really experiencing - in some form - were the effects of practicing a great recovery tool called a “deload week.”
Deloading has become a staple in both of our personal programs and has allowed us to continuously push for bigger numbers and greater strength gains.
Let’s define the idea of a deload.
What is Deloading?
Generally, we define our deload phases as a period of decreased training intensity (amount of resistance used) or volume (number of reps/sets performed), while usually eating at maintenance calories (especially during a fat loss phase) usually four around a week but sometimes less.
Sometimes, deloading can mean completely taking the entire week off, but my recommendation would be to still perform the same sessions you were previously doing while lowering the intensity and/or volume.
There are many ways you can go about deciding what the best set of reps and what percentage of the load you should be using when deloading, but here are a few options:
Keep the same load on your movements, but cut the volume down.
Keep the same volume, but decrease the load you are using.
Use 50-70% of the load from the previous week and hit 50-75% of the volume, which is what I do.
So, the whole purpose of a well-timed and intelligent deload phase is to allow your body to have an extended period of recovery.
What happens is that once we successfully deload, we create a desirable launching point for our next training cycle.
Earlier I mentioned that “a week at home with Mom’s cooking” made us feel like superheroes and that we would hit big numbers upon our return to the gym.
Part of the reason for those feelings was the fact that we weren’t practicing strict progressive overload. We would hit more reps or use more weight, but none of those choices were really well thought-out.
You should still probably feel refreshed after a restful deload week, but you may only notice a slight increase in your performance, especially if your are an intermediate/advanced lifter, or you are following a strict training plan implementing progressive overload strategies.
So, what are the actual benefits of a deload phase?
Benefits of Deloading
I think one of the hardest parts about lifting weights, especially as people get more advanced in their training, is managing your body well in a way that avoids injury.
Lifting weights puts a ton of stress on our bodies, especially on our central nervous system (CNS) and connective tissues, and a lot of that stress is hard to manage.
So, instead of taking a few days off to give our bodies a chance to recover, we can end up injuring ourselves, which can put us out for an extended period of time away from the progress we have been working so hard towards.
To help you avoid those kinds of injuries and to practice healthy recovery, here are some of the benefits of implementing a deload week into your programming:
Muscle Recovery
Lifting with less intensity or less overall volume allows our muscles more time to fully recover.
Central Nervous System (CNS) Recovery
When you’re training in a light to moderate manner, your CNS may recover just fine by the next day, but some studies show - specifically for high volume training - that it may take multiple days for our CNS to fully recover after a very demanding session. And, since training intensity tends to ramp up at the end of a mesocycle, this makes deloading after your overreaching weeks the most beneficial time to sensibly deload.
Psychological Recovery
Just like we need to take breaks from our actual jobs and careers for vacations and weekends away to relax and mentally escape, taking a break from your normal gym routine can also promote mental benefits the next time a heavy squat is staring you in the face.
Connective Tissue Recovery
Muscle tissue generally recovers much faster than our connective tissue (ligaments, tendons, cartilage), and there aren’t any highly reliable ways to track damage done to our connective tissue. Deloading ensures that by decreasing the overall stress on these tissues, we are allowing them to recover and heal for the sake of injury prevention.
It’s worth noting that a majority of the injuries that I and a lot of friends experienced from lifting have been connective tissue injuries since they are so hard to manage properly.
Social Recovery
If you work a normal job and also lift 5-6 days a week, a lot of your precious time is already spent, which leaves less time for friends, family, and other hobbies. One of the best benefits of a deload period has nothing to do with your body, but rather the amount of time that is freed up from shorter or fewer workouts. I love spending this newly available time by hanging out with friends and family.
Now that we know what a deload is and have seen the benefits, how do we know when or how do we plan a deload phase?
How I Personally Know When It’s Time to Deload
There are several different ways to go about adding a deload at the end of your mesocycles, and I will say more about that in the next section, but I wanted to give a quick look into how I personally organize my routine to include deload phases.
But before I do that, I think it’s important to lay out my current approach to training so that I can provide a little bit of context before I talk about my deload.
My Approach to Training
After years of making mistakes, I have finally settled on a sustainable approach to weight lifting, which includes a thoughtful implementation of progressive overloading.
I have spent a lot of time learning about my limits for different exercises in different rep ranges so that I can now intelligently push to increase every week.
The way that I progressively overload is by starting out my mesocycle with 2-3 working sets for each of my exercises for that session, and then each week after I try to add a few total sets for that week along with trying to match or improve upon the number of reps I hit for each set the previous week.
In this way, I can ensure that I am progressing and every week. But, as the demands of progression inevitably increase, the need for a more dedicated recover period become more and more apparent.
At this point in my training journey, I can pretty much predict at about which point I will need to deload (which is usually after four or five weeks of increasingly demanding training), but I only know that because I keep a very organized logbook for each and every one of my sessions.
On occasion, however, I will plan a deload for a specific week, but generally I try to use my logbook to guide my decision making for the appropriate time to deload.
A Look At My Logbook
Here is a look at how I am currently organizing my logbook in Google Sheets.
This has been my Monday AM session for the last several weeks, and I organize everything from rest times to number of reps performed. Each week for this mesocycle is all included in the same Google Sheet so that I can easily check my progress from the previous week and then set a goal for myself for the current week.
So what I like to do is let my body tell me when it’s time to take a break.
Take a look at a few sessions from my previous week of lifting for example:
I’ve included (in parentheses) the decreases from the previous week to this current week for a few of the exercises.
At first glance, only missing a few reps may not be that big of a deal. For example, I may have had a poor night of sleep or felt more stressed that day.
What is important to note is that it’s okay to have one bad day in the gym. Life happens, and sometimes our gym performance struggles. So I will usually chalk up a day like this as a bad day, and I won’t go into a deload because of one day of missing my numbers.
This changes though when I have multiple days of not hitting my numbers in the same week. I interpret this lack of performance as a sign that my body needs a break from the stress I’ve been putting it under.
Here is another session from my logbook in the same week:
I hit this session two days after the pair of sessions in the previous picture.
There was a much greater decrease in performance in a few of the exercises on this day, so I decided I couldn’t really chalk up the lack of performance to tiredness. Instead, I realized I had pushed my body hard for five weeks and that now it was time to deload and recover.
Again, I know that not everyone keeps a detailed logbook for their exercise programs (although we highly recommend it), so you may not be able to use a method like this to help you decide when you should deload.
Here are a few methods for determining the right time to take a deload week.
How You Can Time Your Deload Appriately
Just like most things in life, there isn’t a “one size fits all” approach to deloading. Depending on how you organize your fitness life, there are a few options for you to try:
1. The “Drop in Performance” Approach
In the last section, I spoke a lot about how I personally implement this approach.
Again, the idea is that if you are keeping a good logbook and trying to progressively overload, you will eventually run into a week where you aren’t quite hitting the numbers you want to be hitting - whether that be not performing the same number of reps as the previous week or even not being able to perform an entire set of an exercise.
Again, when you arrive at this situation yourself, make sure that it isn’t just one day of tiredness, but rather multiple days of “missing the mark” in your training before you decide to take a deload week.
What is nice about this method is that it sort of becomes predictable to a point.
Eventually you will start to realize that you have been deloading consistently every four weeks, and you can then start to plan for those deload weeks in future training cycles.
A benefit of knowing how long it takes for your body to reach a point where it’s begging for a deload is that you can begin to plan things around when this week approaches.
For example, if I know I am going to be going on a week long vacation in September, I may try to plan my training so that my deload week lines up perfectly with my vacation.
2. The “Planned” Approach
This approach is exactly what it sounds like: instead of waiting to see your performance drop (especially if you aren’t keeping a logbook), you can just plan a deload week into your training cycle at predetermined time intervals. At IVRY, we personally recommend every 3-6 weeks, but it totally depends on the individual.
Depending on how you look at it, this can be a more carefree approach to deloading because it doesn’t require you to burn any training sessions on subpar performance.
On the same page though, this method can also be less precise.
For example, maybe you have been taking a deload week after four weeks of pushing hard in your training. There is a chance that you could have pushed for a fifth week of hard training, but you would never know it because you chose to deload sooner than you may have needed to.
Again, we are digging into the weeds here a little bit, but I am all about maximizing my output in my performance, and I hate the idea of leaving a good week of hypertrophically stimulating training on the table. Because we are trying to improve, aren’t we?
That being said, this method is probably most conservative way to go about deloading because at least you are giving your body a break over the course of a regular period, and you can know that you are safely recovering. It just might not be quite as precise and appropriately timed as it would be by using an more auto-regulatory method.
Hopefully you found all of this information to be helpful, and if you weren’t adding deloads into your workouts before, maybe we have convinced you to give it a try! The last thing you want is to be chronically banged-up when a focused time of rest and recovery is actually exactly what your body needs to continue growing optimally.
Part of what we include with our personal coaching is an intelligent implementation of deload weeks to ensure that there is plenty of recovery and a limited risk of injury.
If you are interested in learning more about our online coaching, or just want to ask a question or say hello, click here to learn more.
And, we are currently accepting new clients, so don’t be shy. Saying hello just might be the best decision you’ve made this year.