You still will be active. You just won’t be taxing your body/can as much.
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Do you still train to failure on your sets?
No. I reduce weight and volume to around 60%
Keep an eye on my log this week vs next.
This week is my last week before a deload week. You’ll see my training/diet. My plan has planned reloads. When I’m building I’m good for five weeks heavy and then a deloaf on week six. I use the RP hypertrophy app. It’s amazing for setting up your training split whether you use one of their plans or build your own. Highly recommend
Are you building right now or dieting?
I would handle these situations a bit different with diet but training is 60%
I can’t quote any science for you but for deload weeks I go by feel, however I commonly train at 50% both for weight used and volume.
Separately, I’ll take off weeks if I’m feeling especially beat up. I always come back better, and have never regressed during a week off.
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Dieting now
What are your current macros?
IMO, if you feel overtrained while on a diet, but not above 18% body fat, then revert back to a “clean” maintenance diet and allow a systemic recovery.
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40%C 40%P 20%F somewhere in that range
Ok, so if I were dieting with your macro distribution this is what i would do. No science behind this, but it works for me.
Base diet
2000 cals/200p/200c/44f
Deload week diet
2000 cals/300p/100c/44f
I train 5 days per week with weekends off. I would start the deload week dropping the carbs/upping protien and run that to friday. Over the weekend i would bring carbs back and reduce protien back to base diet. This will give you time to fill up glycogen for the next week of hard training. I feel by doing this it keeps the furnace stoked and hot for fat burning.
If i was at maintenance or building and wanted to deload I would leave cals where they are during the deload.
Again, this is what I do. Your mileage may differ.
What sort of training are you doing right now ? What program or type of programming are you following ?
Arms, Legs, chest/back, repeat. 5 days per week.
Are you increasing your reps and weights every week ? Are you making progress ? If you are then no need for a deload. If things are slowing down or have stopped probably time for a deload and then a change of training plan. As Coach John would say everything works until it doesn’t or everything works for 6-10 weeks.
Wouldn’t it be better to take a deload before your body doesn’t give you the choice? I believe that’s the whole point.
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In theory, and some programs schedule deloads at specific intervals, but it’s hard to be 100% dialed in on every variable, and variation can lead to many different outcomes over the same training block.
So if you’re really pushing limits for a competition date or something and you want to maximize training it’s not necessarily ideal to just guesstimate and lose training time. Tuning in to signs as they appear instead makes sense.
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Yes that is the way a lot of programs are written and that is the way I personally work. However without knowing the type of training someone is doing it is hard to say. Plenty of people go to the gym week in week out do the same exercises and reps and don’t really need to deload. It really depends on how hard they are working.
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I’m really torn on whether to just walk and do no training for my deload week or to back off on intensity and volume. If I do the backoff on intensity and volume, I just see myself still trying to hit failure. It will be a challenge to back off.
If you legit think you cannot walk into a gym without training to failure, and your goal for this week is to recover from your training so you can train harder/better in the future, it sounds like the best strategy would be to not go to the gym for this week.
You can’t get very weak by missing 1 week of training, but you can definitely get very hurt by training stupidly for one week.
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Thank you for that dose of reality…I think mentally, I am just going to feel weak and “small” if I don’t train and just walk. That may be my biggest obstacle.
Between this and the fat gain concern, I would honestly be concerned with my relationship with health and fitness if I were in this situation. Have you ever considered speaking with someone versed in matters of human psychology? A sports therapist, or a more general one?
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No, I have not considered that. I feel like this deload is probably needed. I just need to suck it up and do it.