When you train hard for a long period of time, you will cyclically have to lower the intensity of your physical activity if you want to continue progressing. These periodic weeks of unloading or recovery will allow the joints, tendons, muscles, and also your mind, to regenerate and thus return to normal training with more strength than before and, if applicable, reach the competition dates in your best moment. Take advantage of these dates to do it well by following these basic points:
What is a download week?
A deload week is when you significantly reduce overall training volume, intensity, frequency, or a combination of all of these factors. Any of these options is valid to make a download. Depending on the type of athlete you are, one option or another will be better for you. There are those who prefer to reduce the training volume but maintain the intensity and those who prefer to maintain volume and frequencies but reducing intensity. The debate here can be long and interesting, although the reality is that the final consequence would always be the same, and it is none other than leaving our body a greater margin to recover and become stronger.
How to download
Fortunately this is not very difficult, you just have to make downward adjustments to your training plan, although of course, for that you have to have a plan, which is what many people lack. In a typical deload week we would reduce the training volume by fifty percent and the intensity to a maximum of seventy or seventy-five percent. This means that they are shorter workouts than usual and that each session ends with a certain feeling of relaxation and not exhaustion. Remember that it is a week dedicated to recovery.
How to plan a download in advance?
In a perfect world, deload week typically occurs every 4 or 5 weeks, but not everyone responds the same to training and loading. So how do we organize a download week? As a standard we should stick to that estimate of one week after four or five of normal training. If of those normal weeks, there is one in which you have not done anything at all for whatever reasons, the planning that you had done previously makes little sense. Keep in mind that a download is not only important physically, it is also important mentally and emotionally.
The objective of this week is to enter a period of regeneration and recovery in which supercompensation occurs, which is nothing other than collecting the gains of the entire period of progressive overload of the athlete through a volume and training to which he is normally not accustomed. . Fatigue masks our real physical state, we will never really know what shape we are in if we do not give ourselves the opportunity to recover periodically. This is something that many people hooked on exercise have a hard time understanding.
Unloading weeks are essential if we want to prevent injuries, stay fresh and seek to improve our personal bests.
What effects can you expect?
If you are doing it correctly, your body will feel rested. This may seem like very little, but it turns out that feeling renewed is what will give us the opportunity to face normal training again with the maximum guarantees and in a position to try to give a little more effort and intensity. Remember that it is not a relief to abandon yourself, do nothing and dedicate yourself to committing all kinds of excesses without restraint or measure for days, the consequences of the latter take longer to be compensated.
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