The Importance of Deloading for Muscle Growth at He's Fit

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The Importance of Deloading for Muscle Growth

Posted November 23, 2007 at 03:00 PM by Mark Scott

Section: His Fitness, His Health, Physical Health

You likely already know how incredibly important it is that you are always pushing yourself in the gym. Researchers have found that about 8/10 people aren’t lifting enough weights in the gym in order to see full effects they want. If you aren’t applying an overloading stimulus to your muscles when weight lifting, you aren’t going to be seeing a lot of results over time.

The body does not respond well to stable environment. It has an amazing ability to adapt to whatever demands you are placing upon it and once it does, it will no longer see the need to change. You can overcome this issue however if you are consistently increasing the way you stress your body so that it cannot adapt since it never knows what’s coming.

Therefore, a key thing you must be doing during your workouts is changing your routine. Either adding more weight, changing the reps, changing the exercises or changing the order. Any one of those factors will likely produce the results you are looking for.

It’s generally a good idea to change this all up about once every month or so, sometimes more frequently depending on how drastic the change is (weight increases could be made on a more frequent basis if you are growing considerably stronger with your workouts).

With this however, one change that you should implement every so often is a deloading week. What a deloading week basically is is a period where you will work at a reduced intensity and volume. Any well-constructed fitness program should have easier days and then harder days. This is a basic principle of periodization that most people have come to learn throughout their years of weight lifting.

If you are going 100% every single session in the gym, you are going to burn out. You need a few days a week where the intensity is at a reduced level, not only to give your muscles the break they need but to also rest the nervous system.

On top of this however, you should be taking whole entire weeks at an easier pace to really promote the recovery process. Some very highly trained individuals can assess their current body state quite well and will know when their body is asking for a bit more time off than the typical one to two days, however for the rest of the population, this full week deloading phase should come approximately once every three to four months.

You don’t need to just sit around on the couch for the entire week - some physical activity would likely help with the recovery process since it will get the blood circulating again, however for the most part this physical activity should be done at a leisure pace and for recreational reasons.

Try and do something that will get you out of the gym because in addition to this being a physical break, it will also double well as a psychological break also.

So make sure you are monitoring your fitness plan and how your body is responding. It’s definitely important to keep pushing yourself so you can continually make improvements with your time, however, just as important is making sure you are giving your body enough of a chance to grow back stronger so that you can keep pushing as hard as you do.