A deload week is basically like a cheat week with your diet and your exercise, but does it actually help you come back into your routine stronger?
Tiff answers whether a deload week works for you, and how to best look at doing it.
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Host: Tiff Hall
Executive Producer: Rachael Hart
Editor: Adrian Walton
Managing Producer: Ricardo Bardon
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Him.
Welcome back to bounce forward with me, Tip Haul. I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians the land on which I'm recording this podcast, the waundry people of the cooler Nation.
I pay my respects to elders past and present.
Carrie had a great question, what is a deload week. I've been told by a trainer before that I need to deload in my workouts. They said, go crazy, eat what you want for a week, no exercise, and then come back and we'll have tricked your body and you'll end up stronger than when you.
Work out again. I'm not sure I trust this advice.
Help, Oh Carrie, Okay, that sounds fantastic, Like just go crazy, eat what you want, no exercise, and come back and you'll be stronger than before.
Fantastic.
A dload is definitely my jam and a deload week. It is firstly well planned out, and it's a well planned reduction and exercise intensity and volume, and it's commonly incorporated into training programs to facilitate recovery and prevent overtraining. And this whole concept is particularly relevant in strength training or endurance sports and any physical training kind of routine that involves high intensity or high volume periods.
So it's really important.
Let's look at the purpose of a deload week and then how you might integrate it or yeah, because I don't agree with everything your trainer has said. So first of all, the purpose of a deload week is all about recovery. So you've got intense training, It puts a lot of stress on your muscles, a lot of stress on your nervous system and your connective tissues. So deload week allows these systems to recover, to repair, and it's crucial for preventing injuries and that long term fatigue, that nervous system just shutting down and going I've got nothing. So then you've got but also performance improvement. So by incorporating periods of lighter training, you know, particularly athletes can avoid plateaus and they can then have the d deload week maintain and even improve performance by allowing the body to adapt to the training load and then coming back. And then you've got the really important thing, which I reckon is amazing, the mental recovery. Continuous high intensity training can be mentally exhausting, so dload week can also serve as a mental break and help you to stay mentally fresh, and just give you motivation. So how then do you implement all of this? So you've got to look at a reduction in intensity or volume. So there are a few ways to structure a deload week. You can reduce weights, reduce you're lifting by forty to sixty percent of your usual loads, and just maintain the number of repetitions and sets, so just bring the way down.
Or you can reduce volume.
That's another way to approach, to keep the intensity the same, the same amount of weights lifted, but reduce the volume so fewer sets and fewer reps. So instead of reducing the weights, you're reducing the reps and the sets. And then you can also reduce frequencies. So maybe you train three four times a week, so maybe as a dload week, you just trained twice and you're recovering more. And the other way you can do a dload week is by switching out your more intense exercises for less intense exercises. Maybe focusing on different body parts can also bring a break. Maybe you've been really focused on lower body and now you're going to do a bit of core and upper body and just give the lower body a rest. So that's another way of doing it. Timing of deload weeks are really important. So you've got dload weeks are typically scheduled every three to six weeks, depending on the tray intensity of like you know, this is I'm talking about like an athlete here, but the frequency can be based on age, experience, your overall physical condition, and also looking at the signs of needing a dload week. So are you overtraining and having decreased the performance, persistent fatigue, reduced enthusiasm, motivation, Are all these things happening to you, then definitely you do need a dload or more recovery. There are some considerations, so you've got to look at the specific needs of the individual and these can be very widely depending on the athlete's needs or the person's goals and sport they're training for. So what a powerlifter might need is very different to a marathon runner, very different to a mum. But you know, you've got to look at what are your needs and what are your goal and balance those goals. It's important to progress and get the benefit of that recovery. So you want to have your dload weeks very planned and strategic to maximize both. So incorporating dload weeks is really good into your program. I agree with that, and they are key to having long term progression and health in any kind of regime. If you just want to put a bit of lean muscle on, if you're like you know, like me, like a mum, just want to put a bit of lean muscle on. Yes, definitely need deload weeks every now and then. If you're an athlete, yes, absolutely a week off a stringent diet plan. If you're talking diet now, eat whatever you want. Your trainer said, can bruige tor metabolism and help, But I'm not too sure of the science of this one. So if you've been in a calorie deficit for a very long time, it can be good for the metabolism and read it a bit and a great bring great psychological relief to just eat more calories.
But I think eat whatever you want.
In my experience, that can be harmful because you get that kind of binge mentality of the all or nothing attitude where you're either on a diet or a regime, or then you're off the diet doing whatever you want eating it. You don't want that all or nothing. You want this to be strategically planned. So if you're eating I don't know, fourteen hundred calories a day, you might want to increase that to two thousand calories, but just you know, up your protein, up your carbs, you know, be a little bit strategic about it. And in my experienced diet breaks do work the best when they're strategic. So you really want to prevent that metabolic slow down by being on diets for a long period of time anyway, because it can lead to decrease in metabolic rate and that survival mechanism where the body becomes more efficient in using energy and going, oh my gosh, we're in famine. I better slow down everything, And it can affect your hormones. So having a bit of a break from your usual regime with food for a week or so can rebalance levels of important hormones affected by a calorie deficit that you've been in for a very long time. And I'm assuming that this is a long calorie deficit, so such as letum, which regulates your hunger hormones, and cortisol, which is your stress hormones. So all those things can be recalibrated, and most importantly, I think mental health, like having a bit of psychological relief from a diet break where if you're on reduced calories, you're going to feel fatigued.
You know, you're going to feel exhausted.
So having a little break can alleviate that feeling of deprivation and fatigue and improve your mood and well being. So it's very important that you do do this, and it's also very important because it helps your adherence to a diet. So allowing the occasional indulgence or having a week where you're just a little bit more flexible, you're less likely to feel trapped in a diet, and therefore you're going to be more successful long term because you know, hey, I'm going to go a little hard here with a mini cut, and then in three weeks I'm going to have a diet break and then I'm going.
To go back on.
And you always have this thing coming where you feel like it's strategic, it's planned, you know what you're doing, you know why you're doing it, and it's not just like have a week off and eat whatever you want. It's strategically planned and you're replenishing your energy stores, replenish glycogen stores in muscles. You'd feel really good, feel really strong. It's going to increase your physical performance in everyday activities as well as exercise. And the diet breaks just flood your body with nutrients and make sure all your needs are being met. And it's really really good, and it reduces that risk of muscle loss, which is really important. So you calorie restriction, especially significant long calorie restriction can lead to muscle loss, so diet break can maintain that muscle mass and break that cycle and just make sure you're not losing muscle. So I guess diet breaks a really good tool, and dload weeks are really good tools. But my main message here is make sure that they are strategic, that you're not doing all or nothing attitude and having that mentality around exercise and food, that the regime that you're originally on isn't too strict that you need a diet break. If you need a diet break, I think you need to ask yourself the question why why, Because maybe you being in such a long term dieting mentality is not serving you. So that's one thing. Having a dload week from intense training, or maybe you've been going hard. I'm going hard At the moment, I'm trying to increase my muscle mass, so I'm doing four strength sessions a week. I'm having a little bit of creatine supplement, I'm having lots of protein. I'm really trying to kick off my forties by mitigating any perimenopause symptoms and things like that. And I feel like i need a bit of a dload week soon because I've been going hard and that will just mean going down to two sessions a week instead of four and concentrating more on core and upper body because I've been doing more lower body.
So it's like, it's the way you do.
It doesn't have to be complicated, but there does need to be an overarching plan. It can't be just stop exercising and eat whatever you want, because that is not a plan and it will set you back psychologically. Thanks so much for listening to Bounce Forward. I love having your company, So please dm me on Instagram at tip Hole Underscore XO and let me know what topics and questions you'd love me to answer. Don't forget to rate and review me on your podcast app Speak soon.
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