42- How to Know If You Need a Deload Week – The Science of Rest Weeks

Feeling frustrated with your fitness progress despite your hard work at the gym? In this episode of MilesFromHerView, Kat dives into the importance of deload weeks—planned periods of reduced training intensity and volume. 

Discover how these strategic recovery periods can help you break through plateaus, avoid burnout, and return stronger. Kat shares insights from her strength training and ultra-marathon runner experience, offering practical advice for incorporating deload weeks into your routine to optimize your long-term fitness journey. If you feel stuck or overworked, this episode is for you! 

00:00 Introduction: The Frustration of No Progress

00:35 The Concept of Deload Weeks

00:44 Welcome to MilesFromHerView

03:50 Personal Anecdote: Transition from College Athlete

07:22 Signs You Need a Deload Week

14:44 How to Structure Your Deload Week

17:25 Final Thoughts and Encouragement

19:29 Closing Remarks and Call to Action

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Transcript

KAt: 0:00

Have you ever felt Like you're working hard at the gym, but just not making progress. You've been working hard week in week out, but you're just feeling like there's no progress to be made. You're feeling sluggish and unmotivated and maybe a little burnt out. What if I told you that the key to unlocking your next level of strength isn't about pushing harder, but it's actually about pulling back. See, we've been so conditioned to think that more is always better, but what if the secret to breaking through a plateau. Is actually doing less today. We're diving into deload weeks. What are they, why they matter and how taking a step back can actually push you forward.

0:44

Welcome to MilesFromHerVew, the podcast powered by KatFit strength, where busy women like you find practical solutions to fuel your fitness journey with authenticity and resilience. I'm Kat your host, a mom of two active boys, a business owner and an ultra marathon runner and a strength trainer in her forties with nearly two decades of experience. I'm here to help you cut through the noise of fads, hacks, and quick fixes. This is a space where we celebrate womanhood and motherhood. All while building strength and resilience and reconnecting with you from a place of self compassion and worthiness. Whether you're lacing up your running shoes to go out for a run, driving your kids to practice or squeezing in a moment for yourself. I'm right here in the trenches with you. Let's dive in.

KAt: 1:34

Welcome back to MilesFromHerView. I am Kat your host, and my voice is still a little hoarse. I am in Southeast Pennsylvania. I am a diehard Eagles fan. I have been an Eagles fan since I can remember. So Sunday night. Absolutely epic. The funny thing is I didn't even yell that much or scream. But here we are. My voice is still a little in and out, but it was worth it. It was so incredible to watch it and share that with my kids. So today's topic is all about deload weeks and it may seem very counterintuitive at first if I want to get to the next stepping back. will allow me to move forward, but actually deload weeks, there is a purpose and a reason why they are scheduled in. Deload weeks are seen on the athletic level, oftentimes in college athletics, as well as in elite professional sports. And they can be useful for everyday individuals looking to build muscle, looking to gain those cardiological benefits of moving their body. Incorporating movement practices, whether it be swimming, biking, running, et cetera, and how do we incorporate that into our everyday life? Let's start with what is a deload week. It is a planned reduction in training intensity and volume to allow for recovery. I want to make this distinction pretty clear. It's not about doing nothing. It's a strategic recovery that helps your body adapt, repair and come back stronger. So key points there is it's absolutely not about doing nothing. It is a strategic recovery. Because it allows the body to adapt, repair, and come back stronger. So all the work that you do, building up to deload week it allows your body to have that time to fully recover, repair. So that it's building more lean muscle, your muscle mass, and you're going to come back stronger. So think of it as an active recovery period. Instead of maxing out, you're allowing that body to absorb all the work you've been putting in. Now, for me, when I made that transition from being a college athlete and trying to train after college, and then trying to figure out this. Weirdness, I'm going to say it was weird for me to be quite honest for me. This is my story here. It was weird for me to think of, well, how do I define my training now that I'm not specifically training for an athletic event? So I got stuck in the cycle of, I'm going to push my body. I'm in the gym. I'm pushing my body. I'm on the track. I'm just going to keep pushing my body. Week in, week out, I would just push. But what I found was. I started feeling that very sluggish. I was fatigued. I was feeling burnt out, but in my mind, I shouldn't be feeling that way because the weights I was lifting wasn't what I was lifting when I was in college so therefore, in my mind, I wasn't working as hard as I was in college. I didn't apply what I knew as an athlete. And at that time, as a coach coaching college athletes, that I still needed that deload week. In my overall training. So when I put two and two together and yes, being in the business and knowing the knowledge, sometimes we do not apply it to ourselves when I started putting it in, I noticed that I was feeling stronger. I was able to. Build more strength. I was able to see more results that I wanted to see. And the burnout feeling was less. You may not be training for an athletic event, but you are training for life. Now you may have other goals, but the overarching principle is. You're training to help your 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year upon year on decade, you know, you're training so that you feel better, you feel stronger, you feel less aches and pains, you are avoiding or reducing your risk of metabolic diseases that could it. Thank you. You know, come up in your decades in the thirties and forties, fifties, sixties, you are doing the things that have been scientifically proven of strength training, mobility the cardio workouts, all of those things play together, getting the rest, getting the nutrient dense foods so that you are putting your best, forward To have the best decades of your life. Enjoying the time on this earth as healthy as possible. If you are pushing yourself in the gym and I'm going to use a zero to 10 scale, If you're pushing yourself in the gym at a level 10 day in, day out, you're going at a level 10 at home and work If you're doing three to four HIIT workouts a week, and then you're doing a yoga practice, and a long walk on one of the days, and you're just pushing, and that long walk you're, you're pushing super hard, and the yoga, all your workouts, the intensity is super high, It's going to lead to mental and physical fatigue. The other thing that's going to happen is injuries are going to pop up so with all of that training, there is intensity and volume. And so when I set up my clients. Programs. I'm looking at adjusting that intensity and volume and putting in deload weeks where it makes sense. Why you might need a deload week is the signs you want to look for is you're feeling more tired than usual, even with normal sleep, again, normal sleep, you are getting consistent. hours, 68 hours in that range. Consistent sleep. More than just a couple of nights a week. It is consistent based on minimally a good two to three months here. Workouts feel unusually difficult. You're showing up to a workout and this is feeling harder than it should be. So what's called your rate of perceived exertion that is going up. So maybe the workout is supposed to be on an RPE rate of perceived exertion around a six, but it's feeling like an eight or a nine. Or persistent aches and pains or tightness. The other aspect is loss of motivation or just feeling off. Those are signs that you might need that. So right now we're in the winter season some of my clients sleep is a little bit off. There's been a lot of illnesses that have been floating around and we adjust that intensity. Most of my clients are very busy moms who are. holding incredible careers and raising incredible children they might be showing up exhausted to their workouts. Let's adjust, provide a deload week, especially if they're coming off a little bit of a higher intensity training week. They're still able to maintain those workouts, but a child gets sick or snow days happen, et cetera, which increases those stresses. We might throw in a deload week so that they are able to get that good recovery versus pushing that intensity all the time. When you should take a deload week so the timing really depends on your training history, stress levels, and life demands. So it kind of talks a little bit about those life demands and stress levels because they do go in together. So when I have a client coming in, and again, this goes into training history. So you might feel a little sluggish going into workouts or some aches and pains that crop up, especially when you're starting a workout routine. When I have clients starting a workout routine, And they develop DOMS, Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness. I'm looking that they're able to go about their day without altering how they move. It clears pretty quickly. So it's not lasting and they're still able to function. They can still show up to another workout. If they have young children, lift their children. They can get up and down off of a chair relatively easy. They might feel that soreness. They're going up and down stairs, picking up things, moving about. They're not cringing and they're definitely not taking any NSAIDs. No Tylenol, Ibuprofen, Motrin, etc. They are not medicating at all. If you find yourself that you are, for lack of better terms, incapacitated when you start a training routine to the point where you have to alter your life and you're taking NSAIDS, you're starting at too high of a level. Does not mean you're not capable, but that is way too much, way too soon. But going back to that deload week, I look at all of that. So a client is coming in, I'm building their plan, especially if they're starting out. So it's meeting them where they're at so that they're, we're working on expanding their stress capacity. Working out is. stress on the body. We are stressing the muscles. We are stressing the cardiovascular system so that we can build a base so that we can build a whole human stronger so that they can see those composition changes, more lean mass, less non lean mass feeling stronger, feeling more energized. So that's how I'm bringing them in. The deload weeks will be built in every four to six weeks to keep the progress steady When I have clients who are working with me a long time, we shift that a little bit. I've had some clients within a four week period. Take two deload weeks and here's why. Stress on the body is not distinguished between work stress, life stress, and workout stress. The body only understands stress as stress. And if I want the client To see the changes that they need and how those physiological adaptations and they are juggling kids all of life and they have a traveling partner. They themselves have been traveling to. They also have had a sick child pop up there. Another work project dumped on them. There are workouts we decided before all of these unforeseen things have come in, we were going to turn up the intensity, but they're not recovering while they're feeling exhausted. Well, we're gonna put a deload week in there because if we keep that intensity up, it's not that they're not capable of handling that. I want to make that perfectly clear. But if we put a little bit of a deloaded week in there so that they're able to maintain that progress, but allow for better recovery the following week, when things normalize, maybe kids are 100 percent healthy, there's not a traveling partner. They don't have any travel, but the work stress of that project is still there. We're able to increase that intensity with the workout again, that it's just right to see them continue making that progress. So the common concerns that I do hear from clients when I tell them, Hey, we're gonna, we're gonna take a step back is, but I don't want to lose my progress. I don't want to lose my muscle. That's not going to happen because your gains that happen from your workouts are not only in that hour that you're doing that workout or 30 minutes or the duration of that workout. They come when you are done that workout. We want that body to absorb all of that. So the training adaptations not only come with sleep, but also come in those deload weeks. And science shows us that it takes more than three to four weeks of complete Inactivity to lose muscle mass. So complete inactivity. So you might be like, well, I took a vacation. I didn't work out and my work first one or two workouts back or first week of workouts, I just felt blah. I just felt off. I didn't feel good. My weights that I left. Before prior to vacation lifting were, you know, I couldn't lift them. They felt harder. Well, that's okay. Your body's going to adapt. During that deload week, it's not about no workouts for this week. They look different. So we want to make sure the volume might be down, the intensity at which they're lifting might be adjusted, or for some cases, both volume and intensity might go down for my training I have a deload week. They're characterized as aerobic build weeks. There's no speed training. I adjust a little bit with my strength training just so I maximize that full recovery. I want to make sure that I'm Feeling good and recovered, so that when I come back and I'm on that three week build again, I'm setting myself up for success. So let's go into how you can apply this. How to structure your deload week. One way might be in reducing training frequency. Doing three days instead of five days. Or it might look like lowering the weight selection. So you might drop to about 50 to 60 percent of your usual load. So just backing off some of that weight that you're doing or drop a set or do fewer reps. Another way to do it is, Changing lifting sessions to a lot of mobility work or steady state cardio deload weeks is really prioritizing, prioritizing hydration, sleep and nutrition for maximum recovery. Going back to that client example, where, you know, they're dealing with all sorts of travel, kid illness, work projects and deadlines. What about my workouts during those weeks? We might swap out strength training for mobility work while they're prioritizing hydration, sleep, and nutrition so that they're getting that recovery so that they can show up for themselves. Their family in their career, okay, we might throw in some study state. I just want you to get movement. I want you to, if they have a walking pad, if they have some sort of cardio equipment in their house or accessible to them, because again, we're in the Northeast right now, it's inclement weather, we're dealing with ice storms, snow storms, still limited light in the days. that I want them moving. Okay. So they're still getting their body moving. Steady state cardio is good for the body is still still helping gain with those cardiovascular gains. And the mobility work is kind of that placeholder to get back to the body. They're holding a lot of stress and tension most likely because all the things that they're juggling. I want them to focus on that hydration, that nutrition, because that is also going to help that sleep component so that they are maximizing their recovery. It is not that the week that when everything kind of clears up, the kid or kids are healthy again, the partner's home from travel, they don't have travel. And you know, the work. Deadlines have been met that okay. Game on that Monday workouts go up to a level a hundred percent. No, we then work on. You know, building back in that volume, building back in that, that intensity so that they're feeling good. Deload weeks are good and they work when you are following a structured plan. A structured plan is going to allow for progress to be more consistent and deloads are going to be built in. One of the things I want you to take away from here is training smart is knowing when to push and to pull back. This is something that is lost in the loud fitness industry where it looks like you have to push all the time. That is not the case. Knowing when to push and when to pull back truly allows for you to, stay in the game longer. A deload week is not a setback. Honestly, it is one of the boldest power moves you can make to come back stronger and listen to yourself because if you're feeling worn down, take a reset week. I know I said there are about four to six weeks. However, I have clients who are also proof where we've had to add them in because what research doesn't understand is you're 24 hours. It does not mean it is discredited. But the science is if we pull back when we need to, because other things are pushing. So I want you to think about think of all the things that fill your 24 hours. The things that you are responsible and you're also responsible for your health and how we stay in that game longer is knowing when to push and pull in those areas. If you need to pull back on your fitness program so that you can keep showing up the next week and the following week because other things need to take priority again, it's pulling back for a little bit so that you are taking care of your health with hydration, sleep, nutrition, mobility, things that allow you to honor that capacity so that you can push. When you have that ability. I'd love to know what resonated with you. And if you have questions, please message me. I want to make sure that you are gaining information from this podcast. This podcast is not meant to treat. It is meant to hopefully debunk and clear up a lot of stuff that is out there and assist you in your training program in, and to meet you where you are truly at. Thank you for tuning in to MilesFromHerVew powered by catfish drink. If this podcast inspires you don't keep it for yourself, hit, follow, or subscribe to stay updated on the new episodes and leave us a review to help more women and moms discover this space. Your feedback fuels this podcast, and I'd love to hear what's working for you or what topics you want to dive into next. You can connect with me on Instagram at KatFit Strength, or share this episode. With a friend who is ready to embrace her strength. Remember fitness isn't about perfection. It's about showing up for yourself and finding strength in every step of your journey until next time, keep moving forward one mile at a time.