Rethinking the Deload

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DELOAD

Most lifters know you SHOULD deload, but few understand what actually happens when you back off the throttle. It helps to understand the relationship between fitness, fatigue and performance.

Fitness: An athlete’s ability to perform a specific physical task (i.e., a powerlifter is “fit” to lift heavy weights for low reps, but not to run a marathon)
Fatigue: The amount of stress an athlete has experienced (voluntarily during training and involuntarily from outside factors) that limits performance
Performance: An athlete’s ability to demonstrate their fitness at a given moment (Simply, Fitness – Fatigue = Performance)

This chart from Stronger by Science is a nice visual representation of the interplay between fitness, fatigue and performance.

When you train, you’re increasing fitness AND fatigue. This is necessary to get stronger and more skilled at lifting. However, you want just the right amount of fatigue. Not too little that you don’t get stronger, but not so much that you start regressing or get injured. How much fatigue is enough? That’s a great question. We don’t know exactly, which is why programming is like trying to hit a moving target.

As you can see, Fatigue (purple line) and Performance (green line) work opposite each other. You need fatigue to come down and approach baseline for you to be able to showcase your true abilities. If this graph was a training block, the points where the blue line baselines and green line peaks could very well represent a deload.

This baselining of fatigue and skyrocketing of performance is exactly what we want at the time of competition. However, something I’ve come to learn and understand through experience as a lifter and coach is that performance typically doesn’t peak immediately after a deload. Rather, it peaks in the SECOND week of training AFTER a deload. More on this later.

HOW OFTEN SHOULD YOU DELOAD?

I’ve almost always programmed deloads every 4-5 weeks for myself and my lifters. The rule I used was after 12 hard training sessions, you took an easy week of 3-4 easy workouts. So if you train 4 days a week, the deload occurred every 4 weeks, and if you train 3 days a week, you deload every 5 weeks.

In most instances, this is fine. There’s no harm in deloading before you need it if there’s no important date on the horizon, like a powerlifting competition or testing day in the gym. I used this quote from Alex Viada in my previous deloading article and I like it so much, I’m gonna use it again:

I want my athletes to want to train during their deload. If they deload and they come to me and say, “Man, I really needed that,” I know it was too late.

However, it’s important to understand that you may be leaving gains on the table. There is a subtle detraining effect during a deload depending on your level of experience. Newer lifters lose more strength and get more “rusty” during a deload, while more advanced lifters experience less regression.

Back to the question: how often SHOULD we deload? Unfortunately, there’s no clear-cut answer. If you want to deload every 4-5 weeks just to play it safe, that’s fine, but know that progress will come more slowly as you regularly take 1 step back to take 2 steps forward. And let’s be honest, if you’re in this for the long haul AND you don’t have a competition coming up, you should be totally fine with this approach.

Rather than using time intervals as your guide, your performance can dictate when to deload. A performance indicator I often use: 2 consecutive weeks of a reduction in strength levels means it’s time to back off. So if you’re using RPE, percentages or RIR to select training loads and for 2 straight weeks you’re seeing those numbers slip, take a deload. Specifically:

• RPE: the weight you can hit for a given RPE slips OR the same weight increases in RPE for 2 straight weeks
• Percentage: you fail to hit the number of sets and reps you’re supposed to do at a given certain percentage for 2 straight weeks
• RIR: the number of reps you’re hitting for the same RIR at a similar weight drops below a hypertrophy rep range (8-20 reps) OR you’re not getting quality muscle pumps (more of a qualitative indicator here) for 2 straight weeks

Why struggle through 2 weeks before calling for a deload? Because sometimes you just have a bad day or two. People are so damn afraid of struggling through tough times that they pull the plug at the first sign of failure. But often our best performances are just on the other side of the hardest struggles. You just have to keep fighting.

So if you’re chugging along and your lifts keep going up for several weeks in a row, keep training! Don’t deload if you don’t have to. But if your strength trends downward for 2 straight weeks, by all means, take an easy week and restart the process.

DELOADING BEFORE COMPETITION AND MAX TESTING

Ever gone on vacation for a week, only to return home and feel even more exhausted than when you left? You might think, “Man, I need a vacation from my vacation!”

You wouldn’t expect your first training session after your vacation to be spectacular, right? And you certainly wouldn’t try to hit a bunch of new PRs. It takes a few days of resuming your normal routine to feel like yourself again. The same is often true after a deload.

So why do so many people stick a deload week immediately before a competition or max attempts? As someone who’s done that for years, I think the answer is this: we didn’t know any better. And we weren’t paying enough attention to how our performance actually responded to the deload.

The whole point of a deload is to reduce fatigue so that you can demonstrate your true strength potential on the other side. But it’s not like flipping a light switch. It’s more like a dimmer switch that you can gradually turn up and down.

Take a look at the Fitness, Fatigue and Performance chart again. Those green lines don’t shoot straight up in a vertical line. They slope upward and even round off a bit as fatigue completely baselines, which would further suggest that your performance will be highest not immediately after a deload (and certainly not after an extended period of doing nothing at all), but after you’ve resumed training for a bit.

Here’s what I’d typically prescribe to my lifters the week of a competition BEFORE I understood how deloads work:

Monday: Squat 3×3 @ 70%, Bench 3×3 @ 70%, Deadlift 3×1 @ 70%
Wednesday: Squat 3×1 @ 60%, Bench 3×1 @ 60%
Take Thursday and Friday off
Saturday: Compete

That’s not much. While this would certainly reduce fatigue, lifters often noted they felt rusty at the meet and weights felt heavy on their back and in their hands.

Now, I’ll often have the lifter take an easy week 2 weeks out, and then ramp back up with something like this the week of the meet:

Monday: Squat 3×1 @ 80%, 2×3 @ 70% / Bench 3×1 @ 80%, 2×3 @ 70% / Deadlift 3×1 @ 80%
Tuesday: Squat 2×1 @ 80%, 1×3 @ 70% / Bench 2×1 @ 80%, 1×3 @ 70% / Deadlift 2×1 @ 75%
Thursday: Squat 3×1 @ 75% / Bench 3×1 @ 75%
Saturday: Compete

Adding in singles at 80% of the planned third attempt at the meet lets the lifter feel a little more weight, but nothing so heavy that will cause undue fatigue. Plus, hitting each competition lift 2-3 times during the week gives the lifter more practice and a feeling of smoothness and coordination once meet day comes. While some lifters swear by taking it really easy (even taking the whole week off) leading up to a meet, my lifters have had much more success with the second approach over the past year or so.

YOU DO YOU

The optimal time for a deload is ultimately up to you. “Listen to your body” is advice people don’t want to hear, but it’s perhaps the most important skill a lifter can learn or that a coach can pass on to a lifter.

If you’re willing to play the slow game (and most of us should), deloading at regular 4-5 week intervals is perfectly fine. If you’re preparing for a big competition or simply want to make the most gains in the shortest amount of time, consider deloading less often based on your fatigue and performance.