How to strategically plan deloads for optimal performance
Deload weeks, light weeks, off weeks. It doesn’t matter what you call them, but everyone who trains knows that eventually you will need to take one. The question is how and when to do so. The answer to that depends upon your training style and biofeedback.
What is a deload week?
Deload weeks are not rest weeks. Deload weeks are planned weeks when the volume and intensity of your training are reduced to 50-60% of your usual load. There are times when resting is necessary, such as an acute injury, sickness, or allowing for supercompensation before an event.
Supercompensation is the temporary improvement of performance after a period of intense training stress followed by adequate recovery. For example, peaking for a powerlifting meet involves a cycle of ramping up, finding your openers, tapering down, resting, and then competing. A proper peaking cycle will trigger a degree of supercompensation, which should allow you to perform at a greater level than your training numbers. The week off before a meet will allow your body to recover and recuperate while allowing the brief period of over-reaching to do its job so you can perform your best on the platform.
Deload weeks are not triggering supercompensation; they are weeks where you are taking a small step backward in volume and intensity by giving your body and joints an active recovery stimulus. They are vital to the long-term progress of any athlete at any level.
They help prevent injury, act as a mindset reset, and are used to transition between phases of your program.
Injury prevention
Any type of intense training can cause injury, from overuse to strains and, in the worst-case scenario, muscle tears or tendon and joint injuries. Some of those injuries are caused by the unfortunate reality of bad luck, and some can be prevented by utilizing proper deload weeks.
In programs such as 5/3/1 by Jim Wendler, he advocates for deload weeks every fourth week to prevent burnout and to transition to the next phase. My lifters train in four-week cycles, with the fifth week being a deload. My athletes are on the same cycle. This concept has kept my athletes training at a high level for an extended period of time and allows me to use the four-week phases in a block format, where each cycle has a specific training focus. Anecdotally, I believe this is the most efficient method for training at a high intensity long term, as it will prevent burnout, training boredom, and overuse injuries.
Quite simply, the human body can go hard AF, but things can break if you go too hard for too long.
Psychological benefits
Not only is intense training stressful on your body, but it is also stressful for your mind. Day after day, week after week, and month after month, you have to be prepared and ready for the training. Whether you are lifting heavy weights, running to prepare for a race, or planning to compete in a fitness event, the grind is real. Planning deload weeks allows your mind and body to take a breather, recuperate, and look forward to the next phase. It acts as a reprieve and can often rekindle the motivation to return to the work.
I know, “motivation is fleeting,” but motivation is real. Gaslighting people into dismissing motivation is foolish because not everyone is a robot who can flip a switch at will.
Deload weeks often give the trainee a reason to miss the hard work.
I have a current client who is a single-ply lifter. His off-season was spent adding raw strength and mass. Now that we are back in gear, his training is heavier, more intense, and each four-week cycle is working him hard to prepare for an upcoming meet he chooses. He is currently handling weights he used to use as openers, and the added stress from that weight means he looks forward to every deload week. By the end of the deload week, he is mentally ready for the next four-week cycle. So far, we have avoided injury, burnout, and mental fatigue. I strongly believe those deloads are critical to all three.
Your body will only train as hard as your mind allows it to.
Shifting phases/cycles
In block periodization, you have three distinct phases of training.
This is where it gets fun.
Accumulation Phase
This is your base phase. This is called off-season training, and it’s where you lower your intensity, up your volume, and focus on foundational strength, mobility, and work capacity. If you are an athlete, aerobic conditioning is part of this block. Common sense says that after a powerlifting meet or a football season you are not just going to jump back in to heavy weights and sprints. You need time to recover, build, and lay a stronger base for the future. This concept is called “raising the floor.”
Transmutation Phase
This phase is where the weights get heavier, and we start to focus the training for your specific sport. In powerlifting, those are the squat, bench, and deadlift. You should have been doing those three lifts in the accumulation phase, but now, instead of focusing on gaining size and work capacity, we start to work on increasing strength by using weights from 75-90%. For athletes, this phase is where we start to incorporate more sport-specific tasks, such as power and speed.
Realization Phase
This is where you tie all those important qualities together during your peaking phase. This is an important phase if you are competing in a specific event such as a triathlon, running, CrossFit, powerlifting, Olympic lifting, or strongman. Properly peaking for an event is critical, and the realization phase is where you implement this. For athletes who compete in a season, this is more complex, as peaking for an entire season is impossible. For those athletes, the realization phase becomes in-season training where the goal is to maintain their strength, speed, and power the best they can under the intense physical grind of a long season.
In between each phase, a deload week is important to give your body a chance to recover and your mind an opportunity to prepare for the upcoming training cycle.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s talk about a powerlifter who competes in two meets per year, each being 25-26 weeks apart from each other.
A properly structured program, such as the above, will take you from day zero to meet day in an organized fashion with planned deloads before the next phase begins, with the exception being between the peaking cycle from weeks 20 - 25, as this is where the overreaching happens to allow for the rest week to help you recover stronger for your meet.
This is just one method, and there are several methods, such as wave periodization, daily undulating periodization, conjugate periodization, and all of them should have planned deloads. I believe strongly that all high-intensity programs should have these deloads in place, and that includes bodybuilding training.
Bodybuilders can schedule deloads after longer stretches of training since they are not often using weights in excess of 80-90% on a regular basis as strength sport athletes, nor are they incorporating intense sprinting sessions like field athletes, but they are important nonetheless for the same reasons mentioned above. Scheduling them or listening to your biofeedback are two different ways that bodybuilders - or even genpop clients - can take deload weeks.
Biofeedback and deloads
While scheduling deloads is preferred for higher intensity training loads, most people do not train at an intense enough level to necessarily warrant a deload as frequently as I advocate for the athletes already discussed.
This is where listening to your body is important.
Are your joints sore? How’s your motivation? Are you seeing a slight decline in performance? Is your resting heart rate higher? Is your appetite suppressed or increased? Are you sore longer after a workout? These are all signs that it’s time to take a light week to allow your body and mind to decompress and rest. In some cases, taking a complete rest week is needed, but it’s important to listen to your body, take the break, and enjoy it before you are forced to take a break because you strained a muscle or suffered an injury from pushing yourself too hard for too long.
Everything from life stress, a lack of sleep, poor nutrition, and training stress can accumulate into needing a back-off week. Learning to hear what your body is saying is critical to ensuring long-term progress and not long-term frustration.
It’s like watching someone say, “I am in so much pain when I squat heavy,” but they continue to do so despite every rep feeling like the ski jump guy from the Wide World of Sports intro. At some point, you want to scream at the lunacy of this person not listening to what their body is telling them.
To avoid being that person, learn to hear your body before your body screams bloody murder at you.
By now, you should have a good idea what a deload week is, why they are important, and how to implement them. The mentality of going hard all the time is cool in theory, but the body has a breaking point. It is smarter to go hard for a period of time, back off a little, and reload so you can go hard again.
Train smart, not stupid.
I am accepting clients for nutrition and training services. With over 25 years of experience in the fitness industry, I can help you achieve your goals.
Studying for my Master’s in Psychology from APUS
BAS in Applied Nutrition and Health from ASU
AAAI/ISMA - ISSA Strength and Conditioning - Pn1 Certified - ISSA Sports Nutrition
Former Superleague Rugby player
Competitive Strongman from 1999 - 2010
Former NPC Masters Physique Competitor
Former assistant rugby coach for Mentor HS (OH) and former Assistant Rugby Coach at Liberty HS (MO)
2011 Speaker at Denison University’s Strength and Conditioning conference
Three self-published training books
Multiple magazine articles for Muscle and Performance, Muscle & Fitness, and Ironman
Published on PPSC, Elite FTS, and top articles of the week from Ben Bruno and PTDC
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