The typical narrative around achieving a health or fitness goal goes something like this…

“Be prepared to bust your ass!”

“You’re gonna live in the gym.”

“It’s gonna take blood, sweat, tears, and suffering until you reach your goal!”

It’s not often you walk into a gym and see the following motivational sayings. And by not often, I mean never.

• “Hydrate for success!”
• “Sleep 7-9 hours every night!”
• “Prioritize recovery!”
• “Set up rest weeks for yourself!”

It made me laugh to type those out and picture them in bold font plastered on the walls of a big box commercial gym. It’s just not the way this stuff is marketed or communicated.

If I owned a gym, those are EXACTLY the things I’d promote regularly.

Facts are facts, and if you’re overworking yourself and not prioritizing recovery, you’re not likely to reach the goal or level of fitness you want. Those things — hydration, sleep, rest weeks (or de-loads), recovery — are just as important as the effort you put into your workouts.

Maybe even more important.

If you think about the amount of time each day you dedicate to training, as compared to the amount of time each day involved in recovery, the result is pretty lopsided. You spend 1-2 hours a day in the gym, tops. You spend the other 22-23 hours of the day recovering.

That includes hydration, nutrition, stretching, mobility, sleep … the list goes on. You should give just as much thought and energy to your recovery as you do to your training.

By now you get the point. Recovery is extremely important, and it’s important that time for recovery is a regular, structured piece of your training program.

But why?

The De-Load Week, Defined

Let’s start by defining what we mean by a “de-load” week. Up until this point in the article, I’ve listed that term along with “rest week” because they are somewhat similar, and hopefully one of those terms resonates with you.

We’re going to use “de-load” the rest of the way here.

A de-load week is a scheduled week within your training program aimed at reducing the overall training load, or stimulus, in an effort to promote rest and recovery. This week is not a free-for-all. It’s not a week where you do whatever you want. It’s not a week where you do nothing.

It’s a week for rest and recovery, but it’s a week where you’re still training — just to a lesser extent.

If you’re weight training, this often involves a combination of reducing the amount of weight lifted for each exercise, as well as the amount of total sets you do in each given workout.

A general recommendation I give is to cut volume in half for a week. So do the following:

• For each muscle group, do half of the sets you’d typically complete in a normal week of training.
• Within those sets, lower the weight and cut out 2-3 reps for each set.
• Keep your training frequency the same (if you lift five days a week, continue to operate on that schedule but with the reductions listed above).

You can take a similar approach for aerobic training as well. If you’re a runner, and say you are running 15 miles a week across three different workouts, drop it down to 7.5 miles across three runs for the week.

The idea is to continue working the muscles and motor patterns in your training program, but give your body a break.

Why is giving your body a break so important? Let’s dive into that next.

Muscle Fatigue and Recovery

We can look at recovery in a number of ways. Let’s start with the most obvious: muscle fatigue.

During any workout, your body goes through a stimulus that causes fatigue to your muscles. This is true with just about any form of physical fitness, to varying levels. Obviously, a weight training session is going to cause more muscle damage than 20 minutes on the spin bike, but you get the point.

You introduce a stimulus to the body and then must take time to recover from it.

This stuff is rooted in a theory called the fitness-fatigue model, which explains that after a training session you experience immediate fatigue. After that training session you actually have a worse level of fitness than before the session, but in the hours and days that follow your body repairs itself, recovers, and adapts to better handle a similar workload in the future.

So over time your fitness level progressively improves, but it’s not instant and it’s dependent on you prioritizing recovery.

To take this one-step further, most people participate in workout programs that involve multiple consecutive training sessions each week. These sessions accumulate over time to create more and more muscular fatigue. You can recover from session to session, but chances are you’re not fully recovered.

At some point an extended recovery period is needed, and that’s where the de-load week comes into play.

Mental Fatigue and Recovery

It’s not as easy to quantify or evaluate mental fatigue, but it’s still a very real factor in any training or exercise program.

We’re all subject to burn out with any activity. You can only study for so long, or drive so many hours in the car, or lift weights day after day after day for a certain amount of time before it becomes draining. Physically, you feel tired, and mentally you’re just over it.

Stress contributes to this mental fatigue as well. If work, or family, or friends have you stressed, you’re almost certainly going to have less energy and enthusiasm to dedicate to a workout. That’s if you even make it to the gym at all.

All of these factors can lead you to potentially abandon working out altogether. It’s best to avoid the burn out and structure a de-load week in order to provide a structured break to clear your mind.

Often, you’ll find that taking a week off, or reducing your workload in the gym for a week, ends up motivating you to get back after it and continue working hard. If you’re on a roll and consistent with your training, the last thing you want to do it stop, even if it’s what’s best for you.

By doing what’s best for you and taking a structured break, you’ll actually condition yourself to be raring to go with unbridled enthusiasm when the break is over.

Coaching Cues

We briefly went over a few of the coaching cues above, but let’s expand on those and put a solid plan in place.

First off, we’ve established that you need structured time for recovery. We have recovery within a single day, within a week, and within an overall training program.

I’d suggest you cut your training into blocks. An easy way to set up a training block is to first decide how long that block will last. For beginners, one month is probably a good place to start. For more advanced trainees, you can usually stretch it a bit further if you’d like (up to around eight weeks is where I’d draw the line).

At the end of that training block, plan for a one-week de-load where you do the things outlined above:

• If lifting weights, reduce the amount of sets and reps.
• If aerobic training, reduce the overall work load.
• Keep training frequency the same.

Inevitably, the question of nutrition comes up for de-load weeks as well. Since you’re doing less overall work, should you eat fewer calories?

Typically, I say no.

This is a week to promote recovery. Your nutrition is going to help repair and recover your body during this week, so the last thing we should do is withhold nutrients.

After your de-load week is over, you can jump right back into the regular training routine. Chances are, you’ll feel stronger and more energized than ever. That’s a sign that your body is thanking you for prioritizing recovery!

—

I hope you found this article helpful! If you have any questions about fitness and nutrition, or are interested in coaching to help take your training and nutrition to the next level, check out my coaching page and feel free to contact me so we can talk about what type of program would be best for you!

Thanks for reading!

CGF