Fitness

4131 readers

2 users here now

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

odin

sacbuntchris

Are deload weeks necessary? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/fitness

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've been doing yoga for over 2 years multiple times pretty much every week and I restarted weightlifting for mostly hypertrophy dec 2023 after not having done it for 5 years. I've never put that much thought towards "deload weeks" where you take a full on break for a week in order to have your body recover a bit better. Are these a necessity or what are your thoughts towards it?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Deloads as in a full week break from training generally isn't the recommended way to deload, active deloads is the way to go. You also have to take into consideration that different groups of muscle accumulate fatigue at different rates. Your forearms and shoulders won't need as much rest as you posterior chain, etc...

If you go heavy on compound exercises and you aren't a freak of nature like Eddie Hall that can progressively overloaded every week into a ~400kg DL, you'll likely experience at some point that you (temporarily) regress in strength. That would be a clear sign that you should have deloaded already.

Most people I see in the gym don't push themselves anywhere near hard enough for deloads to be a necessity though. So you need to do some introspection and ask yourself if you consistently train hard enough for fatigue to truly accumulate, or if you mostly show up at the gym and just autoregulate based on your feel for the day. Neither approaches as necessarily right or wrong.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

@OP Consider also that while a full week off isn't optimal, it's not bad either. For most people, this works out better because it gives you time to do other stuff.