What Is a Deload and Why Use Deloads?
A deload is a period of time (usually a week but doesn’t have to be) where your training is easier than your usual overloading training.
Easier training is necessary so that you can lower the fatigue that accumulates from hard training. If you don’t lower fatigue it will build up and will halt or even reverse your progress due to regression in performance or even injury.
Lower fatigue, isn’t that what rest days do?
Yes they absolutely do. When you become more advanced rest days aren’t enough. If you’re providing a large enough stimulus to create an overload and progress at a speed that isn’t dismally slow you don’t completely dissipate all fatigue between training sessions.
Who DOESN’T Need to Deload?
Many people won’t actually NEED a deload since they deload unintentionally with enough regularity to never have to consciously take them. They might consistently skip sessions thus getting extra rest days. They also may not actually train hard when they do train (never actually accumulate much fatigue).
Taking conscious deloads are simply a waste of time for THEM in most cases.
Beginners are another group that rarely require deloads (if they do they’re much smaller in magnitude). The beginner stage is defined by rapid progress which necessitates higher relative recovery (otherwise you wouldn’t progress that fast). They’re also not training with much absolute volume/intensity, aren’t as efficient with their technique and therefore can’t induce as much damage to their body.
When the relative intensity is the same training recoverability doesn’t scale linearly with strength level.The stronger you get the harder the necessary training to progress is on your body.
What Happens When You Don’t Deload Enough?
Not deloading enough is more common for serious lifters who prioritise their training highly. If you’re like this (I am) you should consciously plan deloads or your body will deload for you.
If you let your body deload for you you’ll notice drops in performance and aches and pains that if not managed can eventually manifest into injuries.
The nervous system, connective tissue, muscles and psychology of a lifter are all affected by hard training. They all need to be considered when thinking about when and how to deload.
Setting aside unusual circumstances like muscle tears, muscles are usually the quickest of these to recover. Specific types of connective tissue (such as ligaments and tendons) take the longest. Even the nervous system can take relatively long (weeks) if you’re extremely strong enough and have done enough damage. That isn’t easy to do by any means.
Lifter psychology is interesting as it can be quite individual. Even during a deload some lifters will NEED to feel like they’re pushing in some way or they simply won’t actually go and train. Others will be relieved to get a break from hard training.
When you’re someone who really enjoys training hard and pushing yourself, training may be the highlight of your day. If you start dreading training and it somehow becomes the last thing you want to do this is a big red flag and indicates that it’s time to deload soon.
Deloads aren’t the same as time off. Time off does have its place however it doesn’t conserve adaptations as well as a deload. Deloading will maintain adaptations for longer than complete time off.
Performing easier training can speed up recovery while conserving your strength and muscle better than time off.
Supercompensation
Supercompensation is the phenomenon that is thought to occur when you push your body past it’s recovery capabilities (overreaching) for a while and then allow it to recover. After it recovers it “supercompensates” and increases performance past the previous ceiling. Performance being either strength levels or hypertrophy (muscle growth).
This may be theoretically valid but I’m not convinced that it actually occurs to any significant extent. The data we have at the moment isn’t conclusive either but it is a possibility. There is also the risk of pushing it too far and creating a massive recovery hole. In this case even when you recover you don’t actually improve much if at all and in extreme cases performance can actually decrease.
The safe effective bet is to try to time your deload at the point when you’ve accumulated enough fatigue to start seeing performance decreases and not to push much further past that point.
Signs You Need to Deload
You may have heard the phrase “there’s no such thing as overtraining just underrecovery”.
While that may sound cool and hardc0re it’s wrong.
While you can definitely improve your recovery it’s also possible to do enough hard training that no amount of food, sleeps, drugs, stress management and recovery modalities can get you to completely recover before your next workout.
Deload indicators include:
- Low motivation to train.
- Workouts feeling harder than they should.
- Trouble sleeping.
- Lethargy
- Low appetite.
- Increased aches and pains.Being more prone to getting sick.
- EXTREME soreness.
One or two of these may not necessarily indicate that you need to deload. If you have 3-4 or more it’s probably time to consider one. By the time you’ve gotten to this point it might have been better to have already taken one.
How Long are Deloads
You’ve probably heard the term “deload week” before, deloads are usually a week long. There’s no magical reason for this length of time apart from the fact that most peoples training week corresponds to a real life week. Generally people like some consistency in their weekly plan.
If your usual training week corresponds to a real life week but your deload isn’t a multiple of 7 days long you’ll be changing what days you normally train on after the deload.
However if this doesn’t concern you it’s perfectly fine to have a deload that doesn’t last a week long. If your training microcycle doesn’t repeat every 7 days and it repeats every 5,6 or 8 days for example my first suggestion is still to keep the deload the same length as a normal training week.
The main reason being that if you use a different length of deload to your normal training week you’ll also have to adjust your workout split. You’ll have to figure out how to distribute your reduced volume over this new split by also considering the reduced length of the deload week instead of simply reducing the weight, set number and RPE (explained below). In many cases it’s not worth the hassle.
Also consider that you just need a certain amount of time away from training hard. Chances are if you need a deload and your usual training week is 7 days long a 3 day long deload just won’t cut it regardless of how easy it is. You may even try this and feel fine at the end of the deload. Then you start the next mesocycle and rapidly accumulate fatigue much faster than normal.
At most I’d recommend decreasing your deload length by 2 days compared to the length of your normal training week/microcycle.
If your normal training week/microcyle is 5 days long you should probably still take at least 4 days because as mentioned above you still need a certain amount of time away from heavy training.
This is only something I’d recommend doing if you’ve first got some experience with a regular length deload week or have a competent coach guiding you through it.
Common Deload Mistake
A common mistake that people make when deloading is taking it too literally and thinking they just have to drop the load on the bar. This isn’t necessarily the worst thing you can do but if you pair this with doing higher reps or other techniques such as longer negatives you won’t be effectively deloading.
Volume may actually be higher than your normal training if you do this. This may accomplish a reduction in some types of fatigue but as volume is the most fatiguing variable it won’t reduce fatigue enough as a whole, it may even increase it.
How to Deload
The main 3 ways to deload are to reduce volume, intensity (weight on the bar) or both (most common). Other ways including reducing relative intensity (RPE) but this is also accomplished by reducing volume and/or intensity.
When all other factors are equal, barring extremes (like always training above 90% of 1RM) volume is the most fatiguing variable in training. Intensity and RPE are two other factors that can add a lot to fatigue. How much they should be adjusted will depend on goals and your normal training style.
While it is certainly true that different systems in the body and different body parts/joints have different recovery capabilities, training isn’t just local.
Doing heavy squats won’t just tax your legs, it’s centrally fatiguing and will affect upper body training the next day if you push them enough.
In the vast majority of cases it makes sense to deload the entire body as a whole instead of trying to just deload specific body parts. There are other ways to get around more localised fatigue with exercise variation being one of them.
Planned vs Autoregulated Deloads
Deloads can be both planned or autoregulated, there are benefits and drawbacks to both.
I’ve often heard people say planned deloads are a waste of time because there’s no point deloading if you feel great and can hit PRs. To an extent I agree with this, however there’s more to this.
Firstly if you’re on top of your programming you should be able to somewhat accurately predict when you’ve accumulated enough fatigue to see regressions in performance.
If your program is well structured to take into account your personal circumstances your fatigue levels SHOULDN’T be low enough for you to hit PRs when your programming predicts them to be high.
I have NEVER deloaded and though I could have progressed past the previous week on any compound lift.
And secondly you won’t necessarily be able to predict when you’ve done enough damage to connective tissue for it to become an issue. Often when you start feeling pain you’ve ALREADY done enough damage for it to take some decent time to recover, planned deloads help to prevent this from occurring.
Even with this knowledge there are people who will do all they can to avoid scheduling a deload and just push through.
They won’t take autoregulated deloads unless they actually injure themselves, so planned deloads help get around this.
Assuming the lifter won’t be too stubborn and will actually listen to their body autoregulated deloads have their place too.
You can’t always predict life stress and it has a massive affect on your recovery from training. Sometime due to unforeseen circumstances you can be under extra stress which leads to more accumulated fatigue than you’d normally predict. An early deload can be the best course of action.
Deload Recommendations For Strength and Hypertrophy
Deloading is individual. Some people will need to drop volume more, others intensity. This can also be influenced by what type of training you’ve been doing recently. If you’ve been training in a heavy low volume style you’ll need to drop intensity more than volume and vice versa.
I’m going to lay out a general starting point that works well in the vast majority of situations. If you don’t have much experience with deloading this is where I recommend you start, you can always tweak it in the future.
When trying to build overall size and strength I make the first week of the training block a deload/intro week . This week will help the lifter get used to the technique of any new/returning lifts and will also not lead to any/much soreness due to the lower volumes and RPEs used.
The intensity/RPE difference between this week and the next week is the same as any 2 consecutive weeks throughout a mesocycle. As this is the first week it’s the lowest RPE week.
The sets won’t necessarily be “easy” per say but they definitely won’t be hard. This reductions in intensity and RPE aren’t enough by themselves which is why we pair this with a reduction in volume/sets.
The drop in volume is larger due to how much volume affects fatigue and how little volume it takes to conserve adaptations especially in the short term.
I usually put volume at 35-50% of what it is in the overloading weeks (measured in of hard sets).
RPE will differ between exercises with more fatiguing exercises like deadlifts being a lower RPE and easier exercises like single joint isolation lifts being higher. This is jsut a rough average between all exercises.
Using the final week as a baseline with volume (set number) and intensity at 100% :
Week 1 : 35-50% volume, 87.5-90% intensity, average RPE 6-6.5 (DELOAD)
Week 2: 100% volume, 92.5% intensity, average RPE 7
Week 3: 100% volume, 95% intensity, average RPE 7.5
Week 4: 100% volume, 97.5% intensity, average RPE 8
Week 5: 100%volume, 100% intensity, average RPE 8.5
Justification
You don’t HAVE to increase RPE every week. This is my preferred method of progression. You can even increase volume in terms of hard sets when the goal is purely hypertrophy but I don’t usually recommend that for compounds.
For purely strength or strength/size I think hard sets should remain constant for compounds. Single joint or isolation type lifts can see increases in volume, especially when using intensity techniques such as myo reps.
The take home points here are that volume is significantly lower in the deload than the main weeks with RPE and intensity being somewhat lower.
100% doesn’t represent a 1RM. I’m using it to represent the rough baseline average weights for main compounds in the final week of each block. These aren’t exact averages but are pretty close to what I usually do and show the progression between weeks (the important part).
I usually don’t lower intensity by a lot unless apart from extreme situations. Lowering intensity too much makes weights feel heavier in week 2 which can affect performance in the overloading weeks. Most of the people I program for aren’t purely hypertrophy based and care about strength as well. Dropping the weight too much will not conserve the strength adaptation as well. If you’re training purely for hypertrophy and in higher rep ranges it may be okay to lower the intensity further.
Keeping the volume and RPE low while leaving intensity relatively high is an important psychological tool in many cases. It allows the lifter to feel like they’re doing something and not wasting their time. They won’t be messing around with baby weights but it’s still easy enough to dissipate all/the vast majority of fatigue
Most isolation movements aren’t adjusted apart from lower volumes since they’re not very fatiguing. I’ll often just decrease the cluster numbers significantly/get rid of all the clusters when myo reps are being used. RPE may be brought down slightly but they can still be taken pretty close to failure barring injury/significant connective tissue damage.
The majority of the time I see no real issue doing 1 set of curls near failure at the end of a deload workout.
In many cases it may actually help psychologically as most lifters want to push at least something when they’re in the gym even if it’s a deload. Doing this on isolation movements is the best place to fit it in.
In extreme cases of overreaching where the lifter just needs a break from any sort of high RPE work I may just drop the isolations completely, or give the lifter the option to. This isn’t common.
There’s more than one way to deload, it’s not set in stone. If you’re unsure how to set up deloads in your program give this method a shot. It beats doing technique work with baby weights which is what I’ve seen espoused relatively often.
I believe it’ll be more enjoyable and more effective in the majority of cases.
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