Deloads and Digestion
By: Michael Beiter
Stress management is a massive barrier to success for many clients. I've joked with colleagues that we are 'stress consultants' more than trainers. We're not far off; exercise is a stress from which the body must recover. We recover with light activity, mental ease, and sleep.
"Getting sick has kept me from the consistency I need to see results. I'll go hard for two weeks, get ill and start again." A client commented.
"While exercise is undoubtedly healthy, there is a limit to how much of it you can handle before you compromise your system. One such compromise is your immune system tanking and you getting sick. Sometimes, our exercise behavior leads to illness because we are not balancing our time exercising with recovery. We are not managing our stress well. I see illness as your body forcing you to take a break because you didn't listen to the signals it was sending you before. It's like a forced deload." I said.
"Deload?" she said.
"Deloads are planned breaks from exercise to allow your body to recover from the accumulated stress of the previous weeks of training. It gives you a necessary mental and physical break.
You can skip the gym entirely and take naps, walks, and get massages, or you can go in and do a light activity to 'grease the groove,' get the heart pumping, and move some fluids through the body. Depending on the plan, we take them every four to eight weeks.
They are essential for stringing together extended training periods unbroken by injury or illness." I described. For five years, my program had me training three weeks every month and deloading the fourth week.
She had never heard of a deload week, let alone done one.
Deloads are great for recovering from exercise-induced stress, but people need to learn how to recover from general life stress too.
For this, I've always used simple math. We have two systems that we go back and forth between - fight or flight and rest and digest. We are meant to be in a balance between these systems. So, in twenty-four hours, we can spend twelve in fight or flight and the other twelve in rest and digest. I don't see a lot of this balance happening at the daily level, and my client needing to learn about deloads, a foundational exercise concept, further illustrates our need to learn and practice stress management techniques.
In a world of do-more, deloads and digestion are thought to be less critical than doing and consuming. In reality, they are two sides of the same coin that, when balanced, lead to healthy people.
