De-loading in the Real World

Turns out a lot of folks at the gym follow the “watch a bunch of youtube videos” school of programming. If this your only education on how to progress your strength you may not realize that the majority of this content is geared toward a “bodybuilding” style of training, which has some built-in expectations. No content creator with e-books to sell is going to spend much time caveating all this assumptions. But one them is absolutely that you continue to exercise at the most volume of days you can handle each week and never miss workouts.

For the most part, I think that’s actually a reasonable thing to hold onto. Most Americans don’t have enough activity of any kind. So if you get in the habit of going to the gym 5 days a week-in-week-out… well you’re already doing better than most everybody.

Another unstated assumption with this thinking is the need for a “de-load week” every 8 to 12 weeks… or whatever your favorite YouTuber said in that last video. You may need to explicitly program a de-load week, but you may not. Think it through for a moment.

Stress Management

If you were to maintain high training volume for 12 weeks in a row, you’ve been consistently keeping your body under stress. You’ve likely not gotten adequate recovery that entire time. It’s reasonable to reduce loads and use accessory movements for a week or so to reduce the overall stress of the program for a time. Reduced stress means it’s easier for the body to recover and it’s in recovery the adaptation we’re creating can occur.

So you only need a de-load if you first create enough stress. If you aren’t consistent with workouts, never train with intensity, or have only been following your program a short time, you’ve not created the systemic stress worthy of a de-load yet.

Novice vs. Advanced Programs

The newer you are to training, the simpler and shorter the cycle of Stress -> Recovery -> Adaptation is. You can do some work one day, rest, then do that work at a higher intensity a short time later. As you grow to be advanced, the loads (multiplied by sets and reps) create such higher work that you must plan out the stress over a longer period of time.

When you’re creating stress over many weeks, then a de-load week following your most intensity week is more valuable. If you can recover in a day or two, then de-loading is just setting you back from time when you could handle more work. So you only need a de-load once you’re past the novice stage of lifting.

Lifestyle Factors

Your training is not the only stress your body is managing. Your quantity and quality of food, your sleep, your cognitive stress from work or family, the activity outside of the gym, and everything else that’s in your environment also contributes. The simpler your life and better your recovery, the more likely you can continue your training for weeks on end with no interruptions. You only need a de-load if your environmental stress has not hindered your training stress.

A sickness from the kids, a big work project, a death in the family, travel… all kinds of things can lead to missing workouts, messing with recovery leading to less intensity while training, etc. When these things hit you, you can consider a “natural” de-load week. Still exercise when you can, use the lower intensity, then create a plan to re-build the intensity of your program over approximately the same time you were training at this lower stress.

Coaches Take Care of Programming For You

Understanding these variables is a skill of its own and it takes experimentation to find what’s best for you. But coaches have been through these problems before either themselves or with other clients, and they will help you navigate the situation and save you much time and heartache. Creating and adapting your program so that you can focus solely on attending workouts is one of the largest values of joining a coaching-based gym.