What is a Deload Week?
A deload week is when you reduce the intensity and volume of your workouts, allowing your body to recover, recharge, and adapt.
It’s not really heard of in the strength world of fitness, but it’s a common running strategy to not over do it and get injured. Not really even our muscles getting injured, yeah they get rest, but the real point behind this is to give our tendons and joints a chance to recover, the sneaky things that will keep us out the fitness game and on the sidelines.
It’s about taking a step back for two steps forward, because nothing is worse then getting injured and not being able to workout the your fullest capacity.
The deload week might not prevent injuries, but it will definitely help:
- giving our bodies a week to recover from all the gains we’ve been making and improving performance (our muscles, tendons, joints, mind, energy)
- gives us a change of pace
- keeps that motivation up high.
After all, fitness is a long game, a lifestyle, it’s not something we do here and there, but everyday – even if it’s an active recovery day.
The fitness community thinks you should only deload when you need to, or when you plateau, but in my opinion, that would be too late. We want to get right up to that line, almost touch it, but then back off and recover, and break through that ceiling.
How to do the Deload Week
For running, miles get cut down, the workouts aren’t as intense, and maybe there’s more cross-training involved.
The strength deload week is similar, just keep doing your same work out, but differently:
- Lower weights (50 – 80% of max) FEEL YOUR BODY OUT
- Change your reps (maybe its 3 sets of 12 instead of 3 sets of 5)
- Get some active recovery like yoga, stretching, walking
- Try some meditation to reset your mind, a habit you can keep going during your training.
- Since we aren’t going as hard with our workouts, now what be a good time to consider a fast to reset our internals.
The deload doesn’t need to be drastic, although it can be, but it can also be just a slight change of pace
and an easy monthly rhythm to follow (who doesn’t like to keep things simple?)
- 3 weeks of intense training
- 1 week of deload
and repeat that cycle each month
The deload isn’t a cheat week either. We still need to listen to our bodies, stay hydrated, get our sleep, keep up with our diet…
It’s just not working out as hard as we usually would
Going hard when we need to go hard, and backing off at the right times
A balance.
Joe DiAndrea 