What Is a Deload Week and When Should You Take One?

Nikkiey: Real quick, the only ask I could ever have of you guys is to help spread the word so we can help more women lose body fat, build muscle, reach their goals, and feel insanely confident. And the only way we can do that is if you rate, review, and share this podcast. So the single thing I ask you to do is leave a review. It will take you 10 seconds, and it will mean the absolute world to me and may change the world of someone else.

In my nine years of working out, you guys, I have recently implemented more deload weeks because my body just needs it. The cumulative stress over those years is catching up, and I need to take these weeks more seriously. And if I could say one thing, it would be to implement those deload weeks when you're just starting out and really get in the habit of implementing them into your routine.

Yo, yo, yo, what is going on, you guys? Welcome back to The WarriorBabe Show with Nikkiey Stott, co-founder of WarriorBabe. On this podcast, we talk about mindset, methodologies and tactics that will help you lose body fat, build muscle, be strong, and feel insanely confident. I'm your host, Nikkiey Stott, and welcome to today's episode, episode 131, where we're going to deep dive into a crucial, yet very often overlooked, aspect of working out and training.

Guys, I hope that by listening to this podcast today, you get off it and you're like, oh man, new profound knowledge in this fitness journey that I'm on. If you can understand the concept I'm going to talk about today, it can be an absolute game changer for your performance and for your overall health.

So what I want to talk about today is, drumroll please, deload weeks. We're going to talk about what they are and understand them a bit deeper from the psychological and the physiological standpoint. I'm going to dive into some of the science of why they're so important. I'm going to talk about misconceptions around them. And most importantly, towards the end of the podcast, so stay tuned all the way through, I'm going to talk about how you can implement them. I'm going to talk about why listening to your body's signals is really important, how to time them in your training cycle, and nutrition, because nutrition has a little bit of a different approach on these weeks. All of the things.

So I'm going to devote this entire episode to deload weeks. Before hopping on to record this, I looked back at all the episodes of The WarriorBabe Show, and nowhere have I talked about deload weeks yet. And I was like, wow, Nikkiey, you're overlooking it too by not sharing this information with the audience. So I'm really excited to devote this entire episode to this specific concept.

Like I said, if you can understand this concept, if you can wrap your head around it, because I'll tell you one thing, it's hard to implement these. It's hard, especially for those of you that are like, oh, I can't take a day off, let alone reduce half of my volume when I'm going into the gym to have a killer workout. The mental game of accepting these and implementing them is honestly the hardest part. But it could be a huge game changer, not just for your performance, but for your results and for your overall health.

Okay. So first and foremost, what are they, for anybody who has no idea what deload weeks are? Deload weeks are a period, typically a week, hence the name, where you intentionally reduce the intensity, the volume, or the frequency of your workouts. Think of it like this: it is a strategic step back that's designed to allow your body and your mind to recover from the overall cumulative stress that you put on your body with training.

During this week, you're still active, but your routine is less. It's less intense or it has less volume compared to your regular training sessions. The idea here is to have less stress on the body that week. So you may be lifting lighter weights. You may be reducing the number of sets or reps that you're doing. Or if you're a runner, you're reducing the distance or the speed of your runs. Sometimes you're swapping things out from high intensity or overload on volume to something almost restorative.

And that can be really hard to grasp out of the gate, so just stick with me. First of all, a lot of people don't understand this concept, because it's often overlooked, like I said. And two, it's really hard to implement, because people just want to go ham on a routine. When you're following a good routine, the deload weeks are built into it. Inside of WarriorBabe, inside of our Blueprint app, we implement deload weeks for exactly this purpose. It's like, here you go, community, slow down. And I'm going to get into why it's so important in a second, but it's going to help with the overall results that you want to have and see.

So the goal with a deload week is not to push to your physical limits, but to maintain activity that still promotes recovery. When I talk about deload weeks, either in our community or just out with friends or with clients, there's always a question that gets brought up: what is the difference between a deload week and a total rest period?

I think it's really important to distinguish between the two, because they sound pretty similar, but they serve different purposes in a training program. Total rest is exactly what it sounds like. It's a complete break from training. That means no structured exercise, and you're allowing for full physical and mental rest. The deload is what I've already talked about, which is reducing the frequency, intensity, volume, sets or reps. You're cutting your weight in half, which I'll talk about implementing in a little bit, but you're still active that week. With total rest, you're taking off completely. With the deload, you're still showing up to the gym and you're still being somewhat active.

Both of them are really good. They help reduce the risk of injury, the risk of burnout, and the risk of overtraining. The difference is that total rest is usually taken after, say, you run a marathon, or you do a bodybuilding competition, or some other major event. Or you're experiencing burnout, or you have an injury. That's where you would take total rest. If you don't have any of those, then you would be implementing a deload week into the sequence of weeks in your training block. Hang with me, because I'm going to get to that in a second.

What I want to dive into really quick is understanding these from a psychological and a physiological standpoint. Let's talk about the physiological standpoint first. Deload weeks are all about recovery and growth. When you train hard, when you're working out inside the gym, and I always say this, you are not building muscle inside the gym. You are breaking down muscle inside the gym. You are creating microscopic tears in your muscle fibers, and that is a good thing. That's how muscles grow and get stronger. But if you are continuously training without adequate recovery, those tears can accumulate, which can increase your risk of injury and hinder your muscle growth.

So you can be an avid trainer. You can be working out all the time, inside the gym crushing your workouts, and you can still stall on your progress. And this is why: you're not pulling back on the cumulative stress your body is experiencing and taking time to do half of that so your body can catch up on the recovery side of things. During the deload week, you're reducing the stress on your muscles. You're giving them time to repair and time to grow stronger. Think of it like hitting the reset button on your body's recovery process.

Now, diving into the psychological aspect: constant training can be mentally exhausting. So if you implement a deload week, it acts almost like a mental break, and it reduces the risk of burnout that you could experience.

In my nine years of working out, you guys, I have recently implemented more deload weeks because my body just needs it. The cumulative stress over those years is catching up, and I need to take these weeks more seriously. And if I could say one thing, it would be to implement those deload weeks when you're just starting out and really get in the habit, because that's exactly what it is, the habit of implementing them into your routine.

When you implement this, it's not only helping with the physical side of things but the mental side of things. It gives you a chance to step back, to refresh your mind, and to come back with renewed motivation, renewed focus, renewed strength. Taking the mental reset is just as important as taking the physical one. And combining them, you're building your ability to perform better and show up better. When you have those, you're going to get the results that you want. You're giving the body exactly what it needs over the course of your whole fitness journey. I would highly recommend implementing these early on. Trust me, I know, because I waited too long to implement them. And when I did, I saw the immediate reward and gratification.

So what I want to segue into next is some misconceptions about deload weeks. Like I said when I opened the podcast, this is mentally hard to accept and mentally hard to implement, especially for the go-getters who love getting into the gym every single day, or who have a hard time taking an active recovery day, or a hard time going into the gym and only doing half the intensity. This misconception is for you guys.

What people think about deload weeks is that they're for people who are weak, or for people who are being lazy. Those two things couldn't be further from the truth. Listen loud and clear, so that you can accept this and know that other people do this too: the top athletes in the world incorporate deload weeks into their training. It's a sign of training smart. It's not a lack of strength or dedication.

And on the laziness side: laziness is about avoiding effort. Deloading, on the other hand, is a strategic, purposeful reduction in effort. So especially for those of you who may struggle with taking a step back, I want you to fully take this in. It is a strategic effort. Laziness is about avoiding effort. Deloading is a purposeful, intentional reduction of your effort. It's a calculated part of your training, designed to make you stronger and more resilient in the long run.

Hey, I just want to drop a huge appreciation to you guys listening to the show. It means a lot. I hope you're enjoying it, and there's so much more to come. If you are enjoying it, hit the subscribe button. I'd appreciate that tons, and it would help this podcast reach others who need to hear these messages too.

Okay, you guys know I always talk about the long term. I always talk about the big picture, years and years out. Getting to where you want to be takes years. It's not an overnight thing. It's not a three-month thing. It's literally years. And the more you can understand this calculated part of your fitness journey, among all the other things you're learning and implementing, the better. It's designed to make you stronger. It's a strategic action that builds resilience for the long run.

I'm going to use myself as an example. It was maybe five or six years before I actually implemented a deload week. Granted, I took weeks of full rest off, but I never implemented a deload week. Think about that: six years of not implementing it. And even if you aren't doing it now, here's why they're so important. They prevent overtraining. They prevent what I mentioned earlier, tons of accumulated microscopic tears in your muscles, where your muscles have a really hard time recovering.

They also help with increased performance. Like I said a little bit ago, when you take a deload week and you're strategically implementing it into your routine, you will come back stronger. You will come back with renewed motivation and focus to crush the week ahead with your workouts and to remember why you're on this journey. You need that mental break. You need that physical break.

So those are some misconceptions I wanted to squash. I think it's really important to understand you are not lazy. Lazy is people who sit on the couch watching Netflix and avoid going in, or even thinking about a workout. On the flip side, a deload week is a strategic, purposeful, intentional reduction of your effort. You're still showing up. You're still getting into the gym. You're just strategically putting half the workload on your body to allow the recovery process and the growth process to happen.

I need to highlight that a little bit more. I keep saying recovery, recovery, recovery, but a big aspect of deload weeks is that your muscles can grow. And when your muscles grow, that helps you be more toned. Toned, that word. Everybody wants to be more toned. Toned is just having more muscle mass on your body and a lower body fat percentage. And the only way you get more muscle mass is by strength training, weightlifting, putting your body under physical resistance, and then implementing the little things I'm teaching you in this podcast and all the other episodes. That's how you get growth. That's how you get toned. That's how you build more muscle.

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All right, let's talk about how to implement these bad boys into your routine. There are a lot of different ways you could do this. I'm going to talk about the way I do it and the way I coach clients and our community to do it, and you can take it as you want to.

One of the key, effective ways to implement a deload week is to know, first and foremost, when to take one. It's not just about picking a random week off. Although I have worked with clients who are traveling and are going to have a hard time getting in their structured workouts, or the equipment is lacking, so we need to focus on still showing up but reducing the type of workload they're doing. In that case, I would strategically place the deload around their travel weeks.

But broadly speaking, it's not about picking a random week to ease off. It's about strategically aligning your deload with your training cycle and listening to your body's cues. When you're listening to your body's cues, you may have to implement one sooner than what you had already aligned with your training cycle, and I'm going to talk about that in a second. But most importantly, if you're following, say, a four-week or eight-week or 12-week workout program, you're strategically placing these weeks within that frame of time.

And this is why, and I just want to pin this in here, it's so freaking important to follow a structured workout program, for all of the reasons I'm giving, to get the results that you want. If you're someone who goes in and changes up your routine every single week, you're not allowing your body to recognize or get used to the exercises you're doing. So almost every week you may feel like you're sore all over again. I've seen this working with clients. They're like, oh, I wish I had a new workout routine every two weeks. I get bored with my workout routines.

What's the saying? There's a method to the madness of following the same exercises for a period of time. It's the type of stress being put on the body and the muscles, adapting them and getting them to grow. It's called progressive overload, and I've talked about it many times on the podcast. But if you change up your routine every day, every week, every two weeks, there's no consistent routine. There's no consistent resistance. There's no, I've been doing this exercise, I'm getting better at it, I'm getting stronger at it, I can increase my weight, I can increase my reps, I can decrease the sets if I want to. There's none of that.

So, just a little side rant. It's really important to follow a block, or what people call a cycle or a pattern or a training block. When you have a new workout program, VIPs of WarriorBabe, I'm talking to you, or even the Blueprint, we follow something for six to eight weeks. There's a reason you're doing that. So get obsessed with the boring work. Do the boring work, and follow through on it. End rant.

Getting back to it: identifying the right time in your training cycle, in your training block, to do these. It could be a buildup of intensity or a buildup of volume over several weeks, followed by a recovery phase. What I mean is, you're following something for two to three weeks. You're building up sets. You're building up reps. You're building up intensity and volume. You're increasing the weight. And then that's followed by a recovery week, a deload week.

So the common approach, broadly speaking, is to schedule a deload week every four to eight weeks, depending on the type of training you're doing. I'll use the WarriorBabe community as an example. There may be weeks on end where we're doing three sets of squats, then four sets, then five sets, then six sets, and then all of a sudden we're banging out a deload week. Or it may be the same sets across the weeks, but we're increasing a rep or two each week. Or it's the same sets, same reps, but try to go a little heavier on the weight.

So you're following this type of pattern for four weeks, and then the common approach is, bam, because you've been increasing, it's a buildup, you give the body a break. You give your body a deload week, where you decrease your workload by 40% or 50%. You're decreasing your weight by 40% or 50%, or you're cutting your reps by 40% or 50%, or you're going in and doing half the number of sets. I don't usually do the sets; I either do reps or the intensity of the weight.

That would be the timing for implementing these if you're following a structured routine, which you should be, especially if you're looking to build more muscle, be more toned, have lower body fat, and build the aesthetic body you want. You'd be following some type of structured workout routine with set exercises and a set focus for weeks at a time, and then at week four or week six or week eight, you'd implement a deload week, with the reduction in intensity, frequency or volume I talked about.

Here's something I would alter if needed, and this is where a one-on-one approach is so freaking awesome, you guys. Say you're working with a one-on-one coach, which you can do inside the WarriorBabe VIP, and you're telling your coach, hey, I am overly sore, I can't recover, I'm sore for like 72 hours, I have brain fog right now, I'm not sleeping that well. This is where I would say, apart from the structured approach, it is so vital to listen to your body. Your body gives you signals, and it's important to listen to them.

Signs that you need a deload week are all of what I just said: feeling consistently fatigued, persistent soreness that doesn't go away with regular rest, a decline or plateau in your performance, or just feeling insanely drained. If you're experiencing that at, say, week three of your block, then aside from the structured approach, you would throw in a deload week. This is where the benefit of working one-on-one with a coach comes in. You'd do that, then pick back up with your block in the weeks to come, get right back to it normally, and maybe do a four- or five-week stretch before your next deload.

This is what I love: when you're following a structured program, you can work with a one-on-one coach, and outside of the structure, if you need a deload week, it's really easy to implement one. You just pull back on the intensity of what your workouts were for the last two or three weeks. But most importantly, what I'm saying is listen to your body's signals. If you're experiencing any or all of those things, it's not that you try to hammer out another week of your normal frequency, volume and intensity for the four or five days you're scheduled. You know to pull back, and you know this is where you need to implement the deload week. And you implement it, and you do it, and you follow through. I'm telling you, performance, results, strength, mental fortitude, resilience, all of these things are going to 10x from that week. The hardest part is implementing it.

So that's how you implement them, and how to listen to your body when you need one.

The last thing I want to talk about is nutrition. During a deload week, you're expending less energy in your workouts, so depending on your goals, and I need to highlight those words, depending on your goals, you may need to decrease your caloric intake slightly. I'm talking to thousands of you right now, and you know I'm big on personalized, individual touch points, but this podcast is speaking to all of you. The majority of you are probably trying to cut or lose body fat or decrease weight. If that's the case, you would just want to slightly adjust your nutritional focus during this week.

This does not mean you drastically cut down your food intake. Listen to me loud and clear. Your body still needs adequate nutrition to aid the recovery process, to keep building muscle mass, and to maintain the muscle mass you already have. The reason my tone just got elevated is that nutrition is, first of all, the hardest thing for people to implement. And when I say you need to reduce your caloric intake, I feel like people spiral and reduce by something like 500 calories because they're not as active as they were. 500 calories will put you into a deeper deficit. No. Listen loud and clear. You still need to eat. You still need to hit your macros. You still need to make sure you're fueling your body adequately so the recovery process can still happen and so that muscle mass can still be held on to. It's key, key, key to understand that.

All you need to do, if you're in a cut and focusing on a cut, is make a slight adjustment. Slight. I was going to give a number, but I'm not going to, because it's totally individual for everybody. But it is not as drastic as you think. Doing less doesn't mean you need to slash calories. You're still active, I need to say that. You're just expending less energy in those workouts.

And for some people, you don't even need to do anything with your nutrition. You just eat normally and maintain. Maintaining is where the magic freaking happens, you guys. Some of you aren't there yet, but trust me, in years to come, you'll remember when Nikkiey said maintaining is where the magic happens. I promise you that. For some of you listening, you don't need to adjust anything. Still eat normally. For me, I don't adjust much, because I have a lot of muscle mass on my body, and my muscles can't take eating less food. They need the food.

And most importantly, I need to say this: during the weeks you implement a deload, get in your protein. Get in your protein. If there's any macronutrient you should not be skimping on, it's protein. Protein is the king of all the macronutrients. It's what's going to help build the muscle, repair, all of the things. So please do not forget about eating your protein and hitting your protein number. If you fall short on carbs and fats, I'll be the first one to tell you, I don't give a shit. But if you're missing out on your protein, I will be yelling in your face. Just saying. Not really, because I love you guys. But really, protein is important, especially during this week.

Okay, that's the whole spiel I've got on deload weeks. Let's recap. They involve reducing the intensity, volume and frequency of your workouts for a period, typically a week. They are different, my friends, from total rest periods, because you're still active, just at a lower intensity. They help psychologically and physiologically. They provide a mental break. They aid in muscle recovery and growth. They get you the results you want.

Once you implement them, schedule them every four, six or eight weeks, depending on your training intensity and the type of plan you're following. First and foremost, make sure you're following a plan, that you're actually doing it consistently, that you're doing the boring work and the same exercises week to week. Listen to your body's signals. If you have persistent fatigue or persistent soreness, maybe you need a deload week sooner.

Nutrition, last but not least: if needed, adjust slightly to match the reduced energy expenditure, but still focus on protein, fats and carbs, and most importantly protein.

One last thing I didn't touch on in this entire podcast, but I'll close out by saying it: within these weeks, prioritize hydration and prioritize sleep. Those two things are optimal ingredients for recovery during the deload week.

Oh, and one more thing: you're not lazy. It's part of strategic planning. Laziness is avoiding effort. Doing a deload week is strategically and intentionally reducing your intensity. It's all about training smarter, not harder. It's a proactive approach to make sure long-term progress is being made. You're preventing injuries. You're preventing burnout. You're maintaining a healthy balance. All of the things.

So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode today. I hope it shed light on the importance of deload weeks and how you can effectively integrate them into your workout routine. Peace out, guys. See you next time.

Real quick, the only ask I could ever have of you guys is to help spread the word so we can help more women lose body fat, build muscle, reach their goals, and feel insanely confident. And the only way we can do that is if you rate, review, and share this podcast. So the single thing I ask you to do is leave a review. It will take you 10 seconds, and it will mean the absolute world to me and may change the world of someone else.