Coach Kevin answers a question from a listener.
Do we really need exercise breaks and deload weeks?
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Welcome back to Get-Fit Guy, Coach Kevin Don here and this week past week, I received an email from a listener who had come across an older Get-Fit Guy episode and had some questions. The email was as follows:
Hi there,
I just read your article on long-term rest periods from exercise and I found it really interesting.
I'm a 40-year-old guy who does 3 days a week calisthenics and 3 days a week long distance running (18-20km per session) I've always struggled with my weight and I love this new exercise system I have as it's given me a much leaner physique than even in my 20s and generally I feel much better. I eat way better too!
But I know I probably don't eat enough calories for long-term maintenance and I'm toying with the idea of taking a week off the running. But psychologically it makes me uneasy. I know your article was very in-depth but do you think I should take that week's break off running? I don't want to lose what I've gained and I don't want to lose my passion for it either.
Thanks
Ian
Ok, so, first thing is, this was an episode from a previous host, so before I can respond to this, I had to go and read the article.
If you haven’t read or listened to it, the main takeaways were:
There’s a lot to unpack there, and while a lot of it is true,, I will give my own opinions on all of these points and then answer the email!
Firstly, It is absolutely the case that ligaments and tendons respond to training in a different timeframe than muscle does. Ligaments and tendons are made of collagen and muscles are fibrous. It is very often the case that muscles respond much faster to training stimuli than ligaments and tendons. This is why steroid users are so susceptible to tendon injuries. They have such dramatic strength gains that they fall far outside the normal ranges of recovery. However, I can’t say that I would ever really make a sweeping generalization such as saying we should be taking a week off every 6-8 weeks. I think a better course of action is intelligent program design, which will ensure that overload is progressive and mitigates injury with appropriate loading and volume.
Second, it is true to say that you get stronger by recovering. But I also feel this could lead to too much of a focus on recovery, which nowadays is a multi-million dollar industry, with everything from compression sleeves, $1000 inflating compression trousers, percussive drills, wearable devices telling us when “strain” was too high, bloodwork companies, cryotherapy, infra-red saunas, to foam rollers. Recovery is only the other side of training and most people are not under-recovered, they are undertrained. In addition, just to circle back to my point earlier, intelligent program design progressively overloads. It ensures that training is neither under the minimum effective dose nor above the maximum recoverable dose. If you are training with intelligence, you won't need to take off for a recovery week.
Next up: in my own coaching experience, I haven’t seen anyone lose motivation with regular training. I see the opposite, where people lose motivation when training is disrupted for periods of time, such as with the pandemic when gyms and sports clubs shut down.
And finally, I’m not sure that a 5-day hiatus from training is a useful thing to encourage people to do. Many people train for the social, emotional, and mental aspects, and stopping that for 5 days may be detrimental to mental wellbeing. Again, I would rather see people train with intent and intelligent program design than train so hard they cannot recover and need to take a long break.
So with this information, let's get back to the email!
3 days a week of calisthenics and 3 days a week of running sounds like it may be a lot. However, there isn’t enough data here. Data helps us to identify intent. If your intent is to run a marathon in 6 weeks' time, then maybe running 35-40 miles a week is a reasonable volume. However, it sounds like your goal is weight loss, based on the statement that you have always struggled with your weight. Therefore, I would be more inclined to say that with weight loss or maintenance as the intent, 40 miles a week is on the high end.
Any long-term listeners of the show will know that if you don’t have a sport-specific goal and want to train for health, then absolutely some cardio-respiratory endurance will be impactful. But we would need to circle in other important interventions such as strength training. Strength training WITH EXTERNAL LOADING is the only way to progressively overload training to overcome sarcopenia and osteopenia, or the loss of muscle mass and bone mineral density.
I hear you that you are doing calisthenics 3 times a week, but this is typically bodyweight and whilst some gymnastic prowess like pull-ups and single-leg squats are an important part of overall health and movement, it is not possible to continue to get stronger because you cannot add more load.
If you know you don’t take enough calories for long-term maintenance, then it's much more likely that undereating will affect your ability to recover more than not taking a week off. In any training hierarchy, the base of the pyramid is nutrition. If you don't have that dialed in, eventually the wheels will fall off.
I’d also reflect on feeling psychologically uneasy taking a week off training. I wouldn’t call that a red flag, but maybe an amber one. As I noted earlier, there are many amazing emotional and mental benefits to training, but everything has another side. If we get to the point that we are afraid of not training, we may want to assess this, because that can definitely lead to an overtraining scenario. You lose cardiovascular fitness faster than muscle mass (strength is very resilient) but we are talking 0.6-1% only after 7 days.
So do I think you should take a break from running? I don’t know. I don’t have enough data. What I do think is that everyone should evaluate training intent and develop a program that is well-rounded and addresses that intent in an objective way.