This will improve your gains and reduce fatigue

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:32 What is a deload?

01:04 Implementation limitation #1: Gregorian calendar bias

02:08 Implementation limitation #2: A week off is a long period

03:32 Implementation limitation #3: Fatigue is local

04:38 Downside #1: Disruption of habits

05:09 Downside #2: Being sedentary prolongs recovery

05:23 Active recovery

06:02 Pitfalls of traditional deloading

06:45 My online PT Course

07:08 Reactive deloads

08:45 Speed work

09:40 Conclusion

10:40 When to implement reactive deloads?

11:50 Outro

Transcript:

If you want to make long term gains, you can’t just go balls out every time you go to the gym. I learned that the hard way. You get arrested and… What I’m saying is you need to train not just hard, but also smart. That’s where fatigue management comes in. But the way most people handle fatigue management with deload weeks is horribly flawed and doesn’t make any sense. So in this video I’m going to teach you a better way to deload to manage your fatigue more efficiently and make better long term gains.

First, what is the deload exactly? Well, deload literally means you take a load off so you reduce the weights. However, a way that many people implement it is they just take 100% of the weight off and they don’t train. They take a week off and they call that the deload week. More generally speaking in exercise science deloading just means taking your foot off the gas pedal a little bit. It’s a very general concept, and the definition that is often used is: “Deloading is a period of reduced training stress designed to mitigate physiological and psychological fatigue, promote recovery, and enhance preparedness for a subsequent training.” Now, there are three reasons why taking a week off every month is a poor way to implement deloads.

First: The passing of a lunar cycle does not fatigue your muscles, m’kay? I call this a Gregorian calendar bias. We have this concept that because our calendar revolves around days and weeks and months, everything in our training, in our nutrition, and everything in our lives in general must revolve around those same periods. However, there is no reason that you would need a deload one month out. I would say that deloading every month is very frequently and as we’ll see in a moment there is research that deloading this frequently typically hurts your gains. Even if you have a more sensible frequency of deloading doing it proactively sounds nice, but actually is very, very difficult to do in practice because you never know in advance when you’re going to sleep less well, when you’re going to be more stressed, when you’re going to develop an injury. In general, how fatigued you are is very difficult to predict in advance. So ideally we want something auto-regulated. We want something that knows when we are fatigued and then implement a deload rather than setting it and set some arbitrary time point in advance.

Second: Taking a full week off or dramatically reducing its training stress is a very long time period. If you look at the research on how long people recover, typically a trained individual doing an habituated workout will recover within 72 hours at the very most. Even after very extreme training programs. Some studies have looked at doing ten sets of bench presses, for example. Now, a lot of people get confused by this literature because they look at unhabituated stimuli, untrained individuals. And if you look at those types of studies you can see that people might need a full week, ten days or even longer to recover. Because if you get an untrained individual, let’s say you just grab somebody off the streets and you have them do ten sets of squats, or you have them do some insane eccentric overloading protocol they’re going to get insane muscle damage, and it takes a very long time to recover. That’s completely different from a trained individual that has had the repeated bout effect kick in, that has more trained muscles that are more resistant to muscle damage and then they do a workout that they are habituated to already, so they have the benefit of the repeated bout effect, as it’s technically called, then they will recover fast because they will not develop nearly as much fatigue. In some of the research with more moderate training loads we actually see that people can recover within a day and that’s also why full body high frequency training can be very effective. In general my experience is that people dramatically underestimate the body’s recovery capacity which might also be the reason that people perpetually keep being surprised by the super high volume studies showing benefits of even very high volumes.

The third major limitation of deload weeks is that fatigue is, by and large local. I’ve debunked the myth of systemic fatigue and the CNS fatigue boogeyman multiple times on my channel. Here’s a good video that you can watch around this. But research is very clear that muscle fatigue, neuromuscular fatigue is, by and large almost exclusively local in nature. So the fatigue in your biceps does not affect what goes on in your quads. Muscle growth, fatigue, the whole regulation of stress, stimulus, recovery, adaptation… All of that is local in nature. It doesn’t make any sense to deload your biceps because your quads are overtrained. So ideally we want a form of deloading that does the deload specific to the body part that actually needs it. You’ve probably experienced yourself that some of your body parts are much more prone to injury. Those body parts might benefit from lower training stresses and more deloading than other body parts. For example, for me, my elbows get injured super easily, my hips pretty much never do. So I can do hip extensions pretty much every day of the week all the time and my hips will probably never get injured, so I don’t have to worry about that. But for my elbows, I have to play it a lot more safe. In addition to these three major limitations of the way that many people implement deloads, there are also two additional downsides.

First: deload weeks like this, where you change your training frequency, especially if you don’t train at all, will disrupt your habits. Habits are incredibly underrated for long term success. The less you think about your diet, the less you think about your training, the easier things get. You want everything to run on autopilot as much as possible. If your lifestyle, your training, your nutrition all run on autopilot then success is just a matter of time.

The second downside of taking a week off is, ironically, that being sedentary decreases your rate of recovery. Many doctors still have this ancient idea of recovery that if you don’t do anything, you recover the fastest. That is completely flawed. Research shows that active recovery works. Our bodies heal faster when we stay active. If you’re sedentary your blood flow slows down, your immune system slows down, our overall metabolism slows down, especially connective tissues like our tendons, they get very, very little blood flow if we’re not active. You need to have some level of activity and multiple studies show that if you do less intense workouts you actually heal faster. You can train through a lot of muscle damage, a lot of soreness and keep training other muscle groups when some muscle groups might need deloading. Ideally we don’t want to deload every muscle group at the same time. We want to keep exercising and only deload the body parts that actually need it.

To illustrate the pitfalls of the traditional approach deloading taking a week off every four weeks, a study by Coleman et al. found that this exact practice reduced strength gains and did nothing for muscle growth. In fact, eight out of ten effect sizes, still not significantly favored the group that didn’t deload. So they had two groups, one group took a deload weak in the middle of the training program after four weeks, one week off, four more weeks of training and the other group just went full steam ahead the whole 9 weeks. Interestingly, in this study, the subjects were doing 20 sets for a muscle group to failure with verbal encouragement and still taking a week off in the middle hurt their gains rather than improve them. The solution is to use reactive deloads. Reactive deloads are deloads that are not planned in advance, but you do them when some trigger event occurs. There are many ways to implement this.

In this video I’m going to teach you the simplest method, which is simply that if you’re on a decently high volume training program and you plateau or regress in performance instead of progress on any session, on any exercise then you do the deload for that specific exercise right then and there on the spot. So for example: you have a full body workout – squats, overhead press, chin ups… Now last time on squats you did 100 kilos times 6 repetitions and this time you want to get 7. Now let’s say instead of 7 repetitions which would be progress, you only got 4, a clear regression. That suggests that in your stimulus-recovery-adaptation curve you have not yet reached the adaptation phase and you are not yet at the point where you are stronger, assuming that your training volume is on the high end, not on the low end, and you’re not under-training, it suggests that you are still in the recovery phase, which means that you have under-recovered, you are not yet fully recovered from the last workout. In that scenario, you would skip the remaining sets of squats, or ideally you do speed work. We’ll get to that in a moment. Crucially, you keep doing the rest of the workout as planned because just because your quads or your lower back, or whichever body part was for the squats that was not recovered, you can still do chin ups, you can still do overhead presses and still have a productive workout for much of your body. So the simplest method is simply when you realize that on your first set of an exercise you regress or you stall, you skip the remaining sets of that exercise. It’s a very simple way to do reactive deloading, it’s auto-regulated, it works very well. Other body parts can keep training as planned.

Now, if you want to be a little fancy you can do speed work instead of just skipping the sets entirely. Speed work is a nice way, especially if you care about strength development to still get some stimulus in, still do some active recovery, and still get neural adaptations that favor rate of force development, still work on your technique without incurring a lot of fatigue. Usually a very easy way to do speed work is to do at 60 to 70% of your 1RM do sets of 1 to 5 repetitions very explosively. The point is basically that you want a weight that is not completely trivial, it does feel like a work weight, but you’re only doing a few repetitions with that very explosively so that you don’t accumulate any fatigue. If your reps slow down at all, if you accumulate any fatigue that hurts your next performance, you are going too heavy or you’re doing too many reps. Speed work should be light, should be very explosive, but light. Research finds that this accumulates a very little neuromuscular fatigue while still stimulating positive neural adaptations that will benefit strength development.

The nice thing about reactive deloading like this… For one, it’s fully auto regulated. Second: it’s specific to the body parts that actually need it. And third: It allows you to manage fatigue from your lifestyle that you didn’t expect. For example, if you didn’t sleep as well one day, if one workout just took a little bit more out of you than otherwise, you went a bit closer to failure than you expected to, if you were more stressed… These factors have been shown in research to significantly affect your rate of recovery and you cannot anticipate them in advance. With this form of reactive deloading you know that when these events occur in your life and therefore you don’t recover you automatically auto-regulate your training program and you reduce the training stress. So this is basically a very sustainable way to implement fatigue management in your trainings. And again it’s very simple. You just skip the remaining sets of any exercise where the first set, which I call the benchmark sets, you didn’t progress as planned, you actually regressed or you plateaued. That’s the very simple way to do it and I’m not going to complicate it too much further in this video.

But I want to give you one additional tidbit when you should implement these reactive deloads. Now, the simplest method is to just do it for every exercise that you have. But you want a benchmark of performance that is somewhat replicable and reliable. Some exercises are a lot more consistent than others. Squats, Bench press, Deadlift… They are the power lifts because they’re very consistent. You can measure their performance really well and you know when you got a full rep or not. Now, for something like a cable lateral raise the performance is very inconsistent. If you use a different cable pulley your performance can be very different due to differences in the number of pulleys, differences in the traction, if you step a little bit further away from the cable, again your performance might be very different. These exercises that have very poor terminal consistency, if you will, that are very variable in performance, you probably don’t want to do reactive deloads because you might end up deloading half of your workouts. So you want to do reactive deloads when you have a clear benchmark of performance and you know that if you didn’t get that then you probably under-recovered. So reactive deloads are great for most barbell exercises, most dumbbell exercises, compound exercises in general, but you don’t want to do them for every exercise if your performance varies a lot inherently for that exercise.

All right! I hope this helps you out with fatigue management and making better long term sustainable gains in your training programs. If you like this type of evidence based fitness content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.