Hi, I'm Kevin Don, the Get Fit Guy, bringer of facts and slayer of fallacies.

This week I'll be addressing the Deload Week and whether or not you need one.

Deloading is a term you may have heard of.

It's literally what it says on the tin.

A planned period of time where you rest and take a break from training, and it usually lasts a week. I see lots of people

following programs with built-in delodes or taking them because our favorite athlete does,

and I mean, if the pros do it, so must a joke is, right? Well, maybe. If you're a long-time follower of the show,

you'll know that it's super nuanced, and by nuanced, I mean individualized. So why do people

delode anyway? Well, they do it to recover. So at some point, relative intensity becomes so high

the recovery becomes difficult or impossible.

Training day in and day out puts a big tax on your muscles, joints and central nervous system.

When this happens, you can end up on the wrong end of overtraining.

Over training creeps up on you because the early warning signs are similar to those of any

hard training session. You get muscle soreness, a bit of fatigue and some elevated heart rate.

But when those things begin to last longer than one or two days, and there might be accompanied

by other things like lower immune function, so you begin to get

more colds, flus and bugs, maybe a bit of depression or feeling low, and irritability,

then we might be looking at overtraining syndrome. In this situation, rest is absolutely essential.

But at this point, a rest week is a bit like closing the stable door after the horse is bolted.

You want to avoid over training rather than responding to it, so planned delodes are a useful

way of managing fatigue and recovery. Now the hard part with managing this is that most people

enjoy the gym or training in whatever kind of manner they've chosen,

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