Tag: deload week

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For most of my adult life, trying to use “intuition” to decide on rest days would have been a terrible idea. If I’d let myself say, “Hmm. I don’t really feel like a workout today,” I’d scarcely have worked out at all. Instead, I came up with a schedule, and stuck to it, either well or poorly.

When I stuck to it well, I’d see progress. When I stuck to it poorly, I wouldn’t.

Starting around 5 years ago or so, something changed in my brain: I started really enjoying my workouts.

Partially, it was that they were working well, which is just satisfying. But it was more than that. First, I noticed that I felt better after a workout. Then I started feeling better during a workout. Instead of it being hard to motivate myself to work out, I craved workouts.

People who knew me were mildly disturbed by this. It was unlike me. It was certainly unlike them. I would not be surprised if they began to suspect that I was some sort of pod-person.

Because I wanted to work out nearly every day, I would sometimes wonder if I was over-training (or under-recovering), but that’s not trivially easy to determine in the moment.

I’ve long tracked my workouts, but not really in a consistent way—I’d just write down what I did that day. Sometimes I could look back and say, “Wow. That looks like a serious workout,” and other times I’d look back and say, “Was that really a workout?” But often times it wasn’t clear either way.

Just lately though, I’ve been doing the Mark Wildman workout programs that I mentioned a few weeks ago. That gives me a pretty consistent metric. I’m doing three different programs, each of which has 4 to 7 different levels, each of which can be done with an almost infinite range of weights, but they all have a consistency in design: start with a light weight, work up in complexity, then bump up the weight but go back down in complexity. If you’re consciously attempting to make progress, then it’s pretty easy to make each workout “count” as a workout, while avoiding overdoing it in any particular workout.

Me in a hunter's squat holding a 40 lb slamball

But while avoiding overdoing it in any particular workout is good, it is possible to do that, and yet get over-trained, simply by doing too many workouts with inadequate recovery.

So, today I went back over my past 3 months’ training log entries. For my first cut at this, I’m just counting rest days. I figure that I want to work out either 5 or 6 days a week, which makes any week where I have either 1 or 2 rest days a “good” week.

In the past 13 weeks I’ve had 1 week with 0 rest days, 1 week with 3 rest days, and 1 week with 4 rest days. All the rest were “good” weeks with either 1 or 2 rest days.

That’s just about perfect. The usual advice is to take a “deload” week every 4 to 6 weeks, so 2 weeks out of 13 being weeks with extra rest just about hits the nail on the head. The one week with 0 rest days was probably just an artifact of rest days falling outside of one calendar week—not a big deal, as long as it’s rare.

Anyway, the intuitive rest days seem to be working well. I’m getting in my workouts, and I’m getting in adequate rest. I guess I can stick with it for a while.

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Ashleigh VanHouten’s Muscle Maven Radio interview with Andy Galpin had a really useful tidbit that has changed my mental framework for approaching training and recovery.

I already knew that adaptation follows stress, but depends on recovery. What Galpin said that surprised me was: You need to ask, “Will spending more resources on recovery allow you to train more?”

I’d never thought of it that way before. I had generally focused on how to train more—how to find the time, how to find the motivation. But I have a history of “getting serious” about my running or my lifting and then getting injured, which clearly means that more and better recovery would be key to being more successful.

I have dealt with this in the past from the training side: figuring that I need to find the sweet spot where I’m training enough to stimulate an adaptation, but not so much that I injure myself. I have not previous tried to deal with it by figuring that I could devote more resources to recovery, and thereby enable doing the amount of training that I want to do.

Galpin mentions the various obvious things that help recovery—better sleep, better diet, massage, etc. but skims over them to emphasize what he thinks is the important thing: Down-regulating. “The folks who can down-regulate post-workout the fastest get the best adaptations.”

Again, I had not thought of it this way before, but this makes perfect sense. Your workout should be up-regulating—putting your nervous system strongly into a sympathetic (flight-or-flight) state. But remaining in a sympathetic state once the workout is over is doing you no favors. The sooner you can get yourself back into a parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) state, the sooner you can start your recovery.

This is potentially huge. Getting into a proper resting state right after your workout has the potential to add hours a day to your recovery time, compared with remaining in a highly sympathetic state until later.

Galpin mentions breathwork as the most effective tool for down-regulating, and he didn’t seem to think it made much difference what you did (what breathing patterns you used, etc.). Or maybe he just thought that once you started a breathwork practice you’d quickly learn what worked for you. He mentioned Brian MacKenzie as a good place to start for learning about breathwork. I poked around there and found this free introductory course to breath work, which I’ve started watching.

The whole interview is good: Dr. Andy Galpin | MMA training, hydration, and taking ownership over your health. This stuff on recovery and down-regulating is mostly from about the 30-minute point through about the 45-minute point. Highly recommended.