The Deload: Everything You Need Know

When you’re trying hard to gain muscle and strength, you must train with a high level of effort, dedication, and intent. You also need a sufficient amount of volume to stimulate physiological adaptations. That type and amount of training can take its toll on both the body and the nervous system. Old injuries can flare up, new ones can start to appear, and delayed onset muscle soreness might linger longer than usual. You might even begin to notice that your libido, along with your motivation to train, plummets. Not surprisingly, your mood might also start to sour. Enter the deload, the solution to all training problems! You decrease training stress by reducing the weights you’re lifting, the number of sets you’re doing, or the days you’re spending in the gym. You can even exchange your exercises for less demanding ones. You do that for a week and then you feel better. Performance starts to go up again. But… What if you’re feeling fine? What if you’re showing no signs of fatigue or stagnation, or no aches or pains? Should you deload just because a training plan instructs you to? Wouldn’t it be more useful to keep training hard and continue to ride the gains train? What does a deload even do, precisely? Let’s consider all those questions, along with examining some of the best ways to accomplish a successful deload. What Happens When You Deload The old theory about deloading has to do with a phenomenon called supercompensation. You overload the body so that there’s a decrement in performance and then you allow it to rest. Nutrient levels and neurotransmitter levels supposedly swing back up and end up higher than they would typically be, allowing you to get a boost in performance. But that only happens to glycogen stores, not to the factors that play a crucial role in lifting performance. As such, the method is moderately useful for endurance sports, but not so much for lifting. Strength training performance is just not as reliant on glycogen stores as endurance activities. And unless your carb levels are extremely low, you likely will not achieve the level of glycogen depletion that would lead to supercompensation. Deloading also doesn’t supercompensate neurotransmitter levels, but it is true that a deload will help if you’re noticing symptoms of fatigue and your performance is going down. It has to do with beta-adrenergic receptor sensitivity. These are the receptors that interact with adrenaline to excite the nervous system. When they’re activated, your mental awareness and focus increases, you’re more competitive and energetic, and your heart beats faster and stronger. Activated receptors also allow your muscles to contract harder and faster so you’re more efficient at executing movements. If your training is excessive, or if the combination of exercise and day-to-day stress is high, cortisol goes up and these receptors can downregulate. This down-regulation means that you lose your capacity to respond to your adrenaline and your motivation, focus, and performance go down. When you include a deloading week in a weight-training program, the beta-adrenergic receptors recover the lost sensitivity and once again respond more strongly to adrenaline. This will increase strength, speed, motivation, and focus, among other things. So Should I Deload? Deloading is a tool. It’s used to recover beta-adrenergic sensitivity reduced by high cortisol levels. If you don’t suffer from such an issue, the deload won’t do anything for your performance. The training factors that can increase cortisol are: Volume. One of the main functions of cortisol is the mobilization of stored energy. More work means a greater need for fuel, which requires a more significant release of cortisol, which then increases adrenaline. Intensiveness. The harder you push a set, the more stressful it becomes. The closer you go to failure, the more cortisol you release. Psychological stress. When a load or an exercise intimidates you, it can also create a stress response that will lead to higher cortisol levels. Examples include attempting a PR or having a previous injury that makes you insecure about doing a movement. Neurological demands. The more familiar and efficient you are with an exercise, the less stressful it is on the nervous system. More complex movements, however, require a greater focus and mental awareness and in turn create stress. Density. Shorter rest intervals also lead to higher adrenaline levels, which require a more significant release of cortisol. A training program that has a high level of several of these factors is more likely to cause “overtraining.” If you only check one or two of these boxes, your chances of getting into an overtraining state are much lower. But let’s look at how the average lifter works out. I’m talking about the regular Joe you see at the commercial gym. They usually do not push hard, using perhaps a RPE (rate of perceived exertion) of around 7. They pretty much stick to “comfortable”
Origin: The Deload: Everything You Need Know