Remember the last time you dialed back your workouts? Not because you he had yes, but because you determined to? If the answer is no, you are one week late in unloading.
In a de-load week – or, more simply, a de-load – you deliberately back off a bit from your training to allow the body and mind – muscles, joints, nervous system, mood, motivation – to recover from the accumulated stress of hard, consistent training .
Deloading is a technique that has long been used by elite athletes, before and after competition, to help prevent injury, enhance performance, increase motivation and improve long-term results.
What works for them can work for you. Here’s what to expect from an offload — and the best ways to work on your schedule.
What is an offload week?
A deload is a period of reduced intensity and/or volume of training that allows your body to respond to the ever-increasing stress you have placed on it in a sustained training program.
This can confound common wisdom, which generally holds that exercise makes us stronger, leaner and more muscular. But that’s not the whole story.
What brings about these beneficial changes is the proper balance between exercise and recovery.
Think: If exercise alone made you more fit, you could work out around the clock and make even more progress. But you can’t. In fact, if you tried, you would quickly find your performance and results going backwards.
To be effective, even a great workout—the kind that leaves you feeling like you can take on the world—requires rest, food, and recovery in the hours and days that follow.
Why are offload weeks important?
If you follow a well-designed program—one that pushes you a little harder with each successive workout and gives you time to recover from each workout—your next workout will come right after you’ve recovered enough from your last workout.
At that point, you’ll stress your body with another hard workout, recover from that session, and continue the work-recovery cycle, steadily improving as you go.
Unfortunately, you can’t continue this cycle forever: if you could, anyone who exercised consistently could run a four-minute mile and bench a school bus after a few months.
At some point, your ability to perform more work will outstrip your ability to recover, and you’ll hit a plateau. try as you might, you can’t lift heavier, run faster, or do more reps.
When this happens, many serious exercisers, frustrated by their lack of progress, double up on their workouts, adding more sets, exercises or sessions per week in an attempt to reignite their progress.
But this is a huge mistake and a quick recipe for injury and burnout. What you really need is a recovery period: a week or more of gentler activity that allows your body to recover so you can come back fresher, stronger and ready to make progress again.
Hence the unloading. You can still exercise, but these workouts will be much less intense than usual. It works best when you train consistently, increasing your workload steadily over time, as you do in a three-week BODi block.
As explained above, it’s not exactly “down time”. But if you do it right, a deload week will result in great improvements in strength, muscle and fitness.
That’s why we call them “UP” – or “unconditional progress” – weeks: They help ensure that you continue to reach higher and higher peaks of fitness over time.
Method of unloading
Deloading is no excuse to let your fitness program slip away. Instead, try one of these three strategies:
1. Turn down the volume
“Volume” is often used as a vague term for how hard you work but to coaches it refers to how much weight you lift as a percentage of your max.
So, in a normal weight training session, if you can squat 100 pounds at max effort and your workout calls for four sets of six reps at 80 percent of your max, you’d be working with an 80-pound bar.
But during a deload, you’ll reduce the weight you use on each exercise by about 50 percent, performing the same number of sets and reps as you normally would.
So, in a deload week for a program that included the exercise in the previous example, you would perform four sets of six rep squats using 40 pounds.
Although it’s slightly more difficult to calculate, you can do something similar with any type of workout by reducing the speed in a running workout or reducing the resistance in an indoor cycling workout.
Lowering the intensity allows you to practice good form in key movements, get some blood flowing to your muscles and joints, and burn some calories.
Like other forms of de-loading, your muscles have a chance to recover and recover while you have a chance to motivate yourself again to lift heavy.
2. Lower the volume
“Volume” refers to the number of “work” sets and repetitions you perform for each exercise. A work set, unlike a warm-up set, is intended to challenge the muscles at or near their maximum capacity.
In a reduced-volume deload, you cut the number of work sets by about half, while still using the same weight you used the previous week on each exercise.
So if, in the last week of your most recent BODi block, you performed four sets of six rep squats with 100 pounds, you would do two sets of six reps in the deload week, again using 100 pounds.
This method works well for intermediates who have not yet reached their full strength potential. However, advanced gym-goers, who may use 300 pounds or more in some exercises, should opt for reduced-intensity unloading.
300 pounds is much harder on your joints and connective tissue than, say, 100 pounds—even for someone whose muscles are strong enough to handle the heavier load.
It’s simple to reduce volume in other types of training as well: Instead of working sets, you can reduce the distance or time of cycling, running or swimming.
Of course, you can also reduce both intensity and volume: Cut the weights in half and the work sets in half. This is the easiest option, and if you’re feeling particularly tired or fatigued, it may be the best for you.
3. Change your activity
Another de-loading option is to ditch the gym and change activities altogether. On the days you would normally lift weights, instead of swimming, hike, play tennis, jog, hit the heavy bag, ride a bike, or take a dance or cycling class.
Easier is better than extreme. Remember, the motto for the week is recovery, And you won’t get much of that if you spend five days in a cycling lesson with an instructor who thinks she’s training riders for the Tour de France.
Changing up activities is a great way to enjoy the fitness you’ve built up over weeks and months of training, and a great way to discover activities you might otherwise have skipped due to time constraints.
You may even discover a passion for a new activity that you want to incorporate into your exercise program. And that’s a very good thing: For health, longevity, injury prevention and fitness, diversifying your activities is always a good idea.
One week Deload benefits
The benefits of a deload week may seem obvious, but if you’re a dedicated exerciser, they’re essential to continued progress.
It gives your body and mind a break
Let’s say you’re 90 percent recovered two days after a tough workout and you’re hitting the gym for your next workout.
You probably won’t notice much of a difference in your performance, but if you keep at it, you could easily rack up a 50 percent recovery deficit after a week. This can quickly add up to some pretty serious fatigue.
Deloading helps end this cycle, allowing you to fully recharge so you can continue to progress and improve without getting tired or injured.
It can help you redefine your goals
Perhaps the most important benefit of deloading is that it helps you take a macro view of your training program. Instead of thinking only about today’s workout, decluttering helps you see each session as a small part of a big plan that spans many months or years.
That way, you can start to look beyond short-term goals like “lose 10 pounds by summer” and instead consider goals with much broader horizons:
Repair my health in a year.
Complete a 12 mile obstacle course in 18 months.
Add 100 pounds to my deadlift in two years.
When you look at the bigger picture, ambitious goals like these become achievable.
When to unload
Deloading works best for intermediate and advanced lifters who have just completed a three- to six-week period of consistent, progressive training.
Beginners don’t need to get carried away. In general, beginners don’t tax their bodies hard enough to warrant regular one-week breaks and should focus on learning perfect form and building consistency.
If your workouts have been sporadic and haven’t stressed your body enough to stimulate gains in muscle strength and size, then a one-week deload won’t stimulate additional growth. it will just be a week of missed workouts.
But if you’ve been working hard and following a progressive program that forces you to lift more weight for more reps over time, then the deload week will pay off. You’ll earn more by doing less!
