Week off

[anthrax]

What do you do when you want to deload?

1] How long do you stay off?

2] What do you do during this off period?
Lower volume?
Lower weight?
Nothing but cardio?

 

[blut wump]

Back in the dark ages, I used to stop all strenuous activity for a week. These days, I just cut volume until I feel like going at it again.

 

[BOOEY]

I'll take a week off every 12 weeks or so, and during that time I won't do any sort of training. I'll keep my cals at maintenance, cus if you're not creating a demand and you eat in excess cals you'll store it as fat.

 

[hawaii50]

i stay off a couple weeks @ a time.. every 14-16 weeks or so... and eat maintenance cals like booey said.

i don't do anything really.. no cardio.. i like to SHOCK the body when i come back... or maybe i'm just lazy. lol

 

[Madcow2]

Depends on the person and what he's done in the past and what he's trying to do.

A common way to approach unloading is to cut volume and frequency while keeping intensity (%1RM) high. There are certainly other ways to do it, mainly the workload needs to decrease and that's derived from volume and intensity in total work over a period sense. So frequency (the distribution of workload) is less a factor since we are implicitly looking at the whole period - not to say that it has no bearing whatsoever.

Here's some decent blurbs to show how this might be structured in a more macro plan as there are often periods of loading laddered on each other and then more aggressive deloading. So it's not really a cut and dry recipe each time but driven by the demands of the lifter in question.

now, of course in programming for elite athletes it gets much more complicated than thsi. you may also have a 6 month "overload" period, during which you have a series of 5 week periods each consisting of 3 weeks of hard work and 2 weeks of lower stress training. then you may have another 3 or 4 month period of "recovery" consisting of 1 week of "loading" or hard work, then 1 or 2 weeks of reduced training.

all this may be superimposed upon 3 years of slightly harder overall work, in other words slightly higher volume overall... then 1 year of slightly lower volume.

this fits into the fact that the olympics are every 4 years and athletes want to hit their highest performance at the olympics. the greeks do 3 loading weeks followed by 1 unloading week (approx 12 workouts a week during loading, and 9 workouts a week during unloading, also all weights are lowered by about 10kilos during the unloading week)... these are "loading" months, then every 4th month is an "unloading" month consisting of only 1 loading week and 3 unloading weeks. close to a big competition like the olympics... they switch to alternating weeks, 1 loading week followed by 1 unloading week.

personally... when adjusting volume for individuals i am lucky in that i can use testosterone/cortisol ratios from weekly blood draws and also glutamine/glutamate ratios to assist in determining the stress level of the training for an individual athlete. this allows me to be pretty precise in loading an athlete to his limit without crossing the line into real overtraining... then determining the correct volume of training for the unloading period so that recovry takes place without any detraining.

unfortunately i doubt any of you have the rescources to do this or the expertise to interpret the data correctly if you did have access to it. HOWEVER... i do have some "rule of thumb" guidlines... during loading, if you are capable of setting personal records... your not loading hard enough. on the other hand, if performance falls below 85% for more than one or two workouts in a row... then you need to lighten the load.

the length of the loading period is also individual. start with one week to 10 days... after youve gone through a couple of cycles experiment with 2 and 3 week loading periods. very few people can handle a 3 week loading period. i know i cant. howeer the bulgarians and greeks do, so i know some great athletes can do it, and maybe some of you can.

as far as unloading... you should be approaching peak performance after 7-10 days of unloading... you should have peak performance somewhere between 14 and 21 days of unloading.

you dont always want to allow peak performance. you may want to follow 2 or 3 consecutive loading cycles without every allowing complete recover during unloading, if you are really advanced... however i dont recomend this for beginners to this type of training... load then unload long enough to set new personal records... allow another week or two to get good and rested then load again.