What a Deload Week Is, and When to Take One

Most training plans are built on adding something, usually another set or another 2.5 kg on the bar. That works for a good while. Then comes a stretch where the warm-up weights feel heavy and your knees complain on the stairs. The session you used to look forward to turns into one you just get through.

A deload week is the planned answer to that stretch, ideally taken before it arrives. You keep training, but you do noticeably less of it for about a week, then go back to your normal programme. The habit is old in strength sports. The research behind it is thin, and one recent trial found that a week off cost a little strength.

What Coaches Mean by a Deload

In 2023, a group of sports scientists asked experienced strength and physique coaches to agree on a definition, using a Delphi process: rounds of questionnaires that continue until the experts converge. The wording they settled on was “a period of reduced training stress designed to mitigate physiological and psychological fatigue, promote recovery, and enhance preparedness for subsequent training.” Psychological fatigue gets the same billing as the physical kind, so being fed up with your programme is part of what a deload is meant to fix.

Bell, L., Strafford, B.W., Coleman, M., Androulakis Korakakis, P. & Nolan, D. (2023). “Integrating Deloading into Strength and Physique Sports Training Programmes: An International Delphi Consensus Approach.” Sports Medicine - Open, 9, 87.

As coaches usually run it, a deload lasts about a week and comes round every four to eight weeks. Most of the reduction is in volume, meaning fewer sets and reps, while some intensity stays: the weights remain reasonably heavy, but you do less with them.

What Happens When You Train Less

Few trials have tested this directly. In a 2024 study, resistance-trained people followed a supervised programme for nine weeks. One group trained straight through. The other stopped completely for one week at the midpoint, then picked up where they had left off. At the end, the two groups had similar gains in muscle size, power and muscular endurance, but the continuous group came out slightly ahead on lower-body strength.

Coleman, M. et al. (2024). “Gaining more from doing less? The effects of a one-week deload period during supervised resistance training on muscular adaptations.” PeerJ, 12, e16777.

The deload in this trial was a full week of rest, the bluntest version, rather than the lighter week of training most coaches use. Nine weeks is also short, so a small strength gap at the end says little about where the groups would have been a year later.

A Japanese study from 2013 ran for longer, with untrained young men on a bench press programme. Over 24 weeks, one group trained continuously. The other trained in three 6-week blocks with a 3-week break between them, so it lifted for 18 of the 24 weeks. Both groups finished with similar gains in muscle size and strength. It was a small study of beginners doing one exercise, so it doesn’t carry over neatly to experienced lifters, but it suggests a few weeks away costs less than people fear.

Ogasawara, R., Yasuda, T., Ishii, N. & Abe, T. (2013). “Comparison of muscle hypertrophy following 6-month of continuous and periodic strength training.” European Journal of Applied Physiology, 113(4), 975-985.

Taken together, the research says a short break doesn’t undo much. It doesn’t show that deloads make you stronger, and the one trial in trained lifters leaned slightly the other way. The better case for a deload is as insurance against fatigue that builds up over months, and against the plain boredom of running the same sessions week after week.

Signs You Might Need One

Some coaches put deloads in the calendar in advance. Others wait for the signs, which are fairly unglamorous: your lifts or running paces have stalled for a couple of weeks even though you’re sleeping and eating as usual, aches hang around from one session to the next instead of fading, your sleep has got worse, or you’ve stopped wanting to train at all.

One bad session doesn’t count. A few of these together for a week or two point to fatigue piling up. They overlap with the early signs of overreaching, which we went through in our article on overtraining. A lighter week is the cheap thing to try first. If it doesn’t help, or if you have pain that is sharp, in one spot or getting worse, see a doctor or physiotherapist rather than training through it.

How to Run a Deload Week

The simplest version keeps your normal sessions and cuts the work. Do the same exercises on the same days, but about half the sets, with the weight a bit lighter than usual and every set finishing well short of failure. You should leave feeling you could have done the whole session again. If you’d rather step away from the barbell for a week, swap it for easy cardio and mobility work.

The same idea works for anyone who trains most days. Runners often call it a cutback week: shorter runs, mostly at an easy pace, perhaps with one short faster session so your legs don’t forget it. If you’ve only been training for a couple of months and are still improving most weeks, there’s little reason to schedule one yet.

In Lamplit’s workout log, record deload sessions as usual and set the intensity to light. The week then shows up in your history as a planned dip rather than a gap. For the “do I need one?” question, the free sleep log and the journal’s mood check-in help: if your sleep quality has been sliding and your mood has been flat for a couple of weeks while the training kept climbing, it’s probably time for the lighter week. With Lamplit Max, training also adapts to your recovery, using signals such as sleep and HRV.

Log your next workout in Lamplit, and set it to light if this is your easy week.