Many of us have suffered from the effects of excessive training without knowing what was to blame. Excessive training typically manifests as chronic fatigue. But if left unchecked, it can lead to overtraining which is when the body begins to exhibit more severe symptoms like loss of appetite and sleep deprivation, as well as your blood pressure getting all out of whack.
When I began lifting, my mentality was "GO" and "GO HARD." "Lift heavy shit often, and you'll get bigger and stronger." That only got me so far before I hit a wall and eventually ended up on the PUP list and out of the gym entirely for the better part of a year. Looking back, I realize I was completely unaware I had pushed right past excessive training and deep into overtraining. I could have avoided a lot of pain and suffering had I just allowed my body the time it needed to recover properly.
One of the Seven Laws of Training is the GAS Principle (General Adaptation Syndrome). Coined by Endocrinologist Hans Selye, it states that our bodies undergo stress in three distinct stages: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion.
Alarm, also referred to as shock, is the training. You shock your body when you lift heavy things or run sprints all afternoon.
Resistance is how your body compensates. In the case of strength training, resistance is adapting in the form of growing stronger.
Exhaustion occurs when there is too much shock and not enough resistance.
The days you take off between trips to the gym are the time your body needs to compensate (recover) from the stress imposed by lifting—the time required for you to avoid exhaustion. You can think of those days as microcycle recovery days. But you don't just lift for a few days a week and then stop. Within The Lift League, you have years of training ahead of you. So you need to think about recovery on a larger scale.
Your body requires more than a day or two to recover from longer training cycles, and the longer you push your body's limits, the longer it will take to recover fully. Just because you are no longer sore does not mean your body has healed from your previous training session. Your ligaments and joint tissue take longer to heal than muscle.
Deloading is a form of active recovery which allows you to keep working and maintain your gym schedule while your body has the time it needs to recover. Studies have shown that "using lower volumes and/or intensities allows for the recovery or regeneration of the underlying physiological systems that support performance."*
Deloading can range from a single training session to an entire week's worth of active recovery. The Lift League uses 4-week mesocycles so the deloading program needed to be of a proportionate duration. The Lift League Deloading Program is a free-to-download single-week program scheduling training sessions on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The deloading program uses a single push movement (bench press), a single pull movement (barbell row), a lower body anterior chain movement (squat), and a posterior chain movement (deadlift). Each exercise uses 50% of an athlete's working weight, and the training volume tappers from a 3x12 rep scheme on Monday to a 3x8 rep scheme on Friday.
FREE Deloading Program link below.
*Bompa TOH, Gregory G. Chapter 7: training cycles. In: Periodization: Theory and Methodology of Training. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2009. pp. 165–191.
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