Some swear by them. Some say they are bullshit. Some use them as an excuse to go off the hinges for a week.
Some use them to optimize performance.
There’s an art to getting the most out of them.
Yes, today we’re talking about the art of using deloads to optimize training, performance and recovery.
Deloads: What Are They?
Deloads basically are planned weeks off in your training program. They can be used as like a transition from one training block to another while allowing your mind and body to fully recover from the previous block while getting prepared to go hard again for a couple of weeks.
Deloads typically last a week and are normally programmed every 4-6 weeks of training.
A deload is not a complete halt to training however, a deload is what it suggests, its reducing the ‘load’ of your training for a few days to allow yourself recover and recharge. So really, its an active recovery week.
When Should You Take a Deload Week?
Normally our bodies do a great job of telling us when enough is enough and we need a break. Unfortunately we just don’t do a great job of listening to them until its too late.
Listening to our bodies is a skill and it comes with time and experience, but with that said there are some tell tale signs that its time to slow things down for a few days before things get out of hand:
- Your sleeping pattern is off. Your waking up in the middle of the night or sleeping in way later than usual. And as a result your dead on your feet all day, everyday. Sure sometimes tiredness is something we can push through but if its persistent over a couple of days where you haven’t had a spike in exercise or something and your tired to a point where your just flat and acting like a zombie, chances are your very close to burnout and need to reel it in fast.
- Your workouts are just a grind, not even a grind, just an awful slog. Day after day your legs are tired and max effort is just not possible because you haven’t the energy or motivation to push through. If you can’t get yourself psyched up by a good warm-up or your workouts don’t excite you anymore, then its probably time for a break.
- Muscular fatigue is a big problem, all the time. Sure after a hard workout those DOM’s come for your ass and your joints ache a little but but if you can’t seem to shake them off and bounce back and stretching and doing all the right things to recover aren’t helping then its probably a good time to look at deloading.
There’s a reason deloads are typically planned and included in training cycle’s. If you go hard for 3-4 weeks in the gym, on the court or on the field, by that fourth week your going to be struggling to bring them same energy and intensity. And thats okay, its natural to get tired, theres no shame in it. Even the best athletes in the world get tired and sick of training.
But the really elite athletes realise this and use it to their advantage. Sure pushing through fatigue every once and a while can be a key weapon in building mental toughness, but having to do it every workout leads to burnout and burn out leads to injuries and injuries lead to missing games, or worse.
So elite and high level athletes and trainers use a planned deload every 3-4 weeks to say ‘Hey we go hard for the next 3 weeks and then we’ll chill for a week before going again’. This allows us as athletes to give everything for a few weeks and stay locked in, and able to to stay at 100% all season long instead of starting at 100% and dropping off and finishing at 10% feeling dead and instead of getting better again next season, having to all the way back to the beginning.
So when you start to see the signs ask yourself:
Is this just a day I need to push through or is this my body telling me ‘I need a break’?
How To Deload:
Like I said earlier, a deload week is like an active recovery week, not a week off so there are a couple of methods and techniques to getting the most out of a deload week.
- Reduce Your Volume in the Gym:
A good way to deload but keep up with your training so you don’t fall off is to reduce either the volume, weight or number of exercises you do when your lifting.
So say on leg day say you were doing 4×8 barbell squat with the aim of improving strength so your lifting as heavy as possible, one way to deload would be to lift 40-70% of your max for 4×8 instead of 100% of it. So if you are squatting 80 kgs, you could lower it down to 40-60 kgs.
Or, you could lift at 80-100% of your max and just half the reps if you like that feeling of lifting heavy but need a bit of a break. So maybe you be 80 kgs at 4×4 or something instead.
Another good thing to do would be to leave out some of your smaller, auxilary lifts, so instead of having barbell squats and then dumbell lunges, single leg RDLS and another superset or two, leave out some of the smaller less important lifts and/or reduce their load and volume.
These methods are great for keeping up training while in a deload week to help you recover and get ready for the next training block of your gym program.
2. Do Some Aerobic Exercise:
Aerobic exercise is great for when it comes to recovery. Aerobic exercise are a great low intensity way to get oxygen and blood flowing arounf the body to flush out and lactic acid thats built up in muscles and loosen them out. I guarantee after a hard few days in the gym or on the court a light jog or cycle will really help loosen out the legs and flush out a lot of the tightness and fatigue you feel in your body.
So, instead of going hard on the court or in the gym when you need to deload, get out and go for a walk or a jog or a cycle or a swim or something. Ideally cycle or swim, our joints take a hell of a pound from being on the court or field so much along with plyometrics, so reduce the ground contacts and take the weight off your joints and try something new or something you don’t do that often like swimming!
3. Do Something Different:
Chances are if you’ve reached the stage where you need to deload your sick of the gym and the court or the field and there the last thing you want to see.
So, go out and try something completely different and preferably lower in intensity. Grab a few friends and go play tennis or a round or two of golf or go to the beach and go for a swim.
Just get out of your head and relax for a while. Its easy get caught up in the grind and forget to have fun and enjoy the process. Not everything has to help you get better at your sport, your allowed have fun aswell.
In fact you need to have fun and relax and unwind, its the most important one when it comes to getting recharged and ready to go back at it hard all over again!
Final Note: Listen To Your Body.
We all love the idea of ‘grinding’, of ‘being in the trenches’ and finding our own inner Mamba and becoming the best we can be.
But our bodies can only take so much before they need a break to catch up, and so do our minds.
The idea of working yourself to exhaustion is admirable, but in reality working to exhaustion leads to burnout, injuries and long painful months of rehab.
For me it meant missing a whole season of basketball with tendinitis because I chose to ignore my body and mind my when I knew I needed a break.
Listen to your body.
Take that break.
Because that week of a break could mean years more playing time.
Stay workin’
Aaron.
Silent Grind Performance 
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