People who train hard mostly see success as their bodies transform over time. But there are days when they feel they have hit a wall and see no progress. At this time, most fitness enthusiasts feel they are not doing enough and start pushing themselves harder. But this is not the solution. According to exercise scientist Dr. Mike Israetel, it means that your body needs rest.
In a conversation with Dave Tate on the Elitefts YouTube channel, Dr. Mike talked about his app, the de-loading process, and how it helps the body’s recovery.
Ideally, a de-load period is when one lowers the intensity of training for a short period. This means you need to lift lighter weights or reduce the exercise volume. Most people worry about how to take a break without losing their hard-earned gains. This is where the idea of “de-load” comes into play.
During the conversation, Dave asked Dr. Israetel, “For those that are building a hypertrophy phase right, what do you think is the optimal time duration of that phase would be?”
Dr. Mike, without any hesitation, answered that anything between a four-week-long mesocycle and an eight-week-long mesocycle that includes one week of intensity for a de-load seems to be generally a good idea for muscle growth
“If you train for much longer than about three weeks hard before taking a deload. You do what’s called a two-to-one paradigm. Two weeks of accumulation, one week of deload.”
Furthermore, Dr. Israetel gave an example of an elite signed by Dave back in the day known as Chad Ike. Mike followed his blog for a while and noticed that he used to de-load every two or three weeks for a year. He stated that quality training time needed to accumulate for some weeks.
Moreover, he mentions that an accumulation of two weeks is a deal out of one if you think about it. If you assume you don’t make a lot of progress on your de-load week, you spend two-thirds of the year getting better and the third of the year not getting better.
“Training is better when it’s stacked up over multiple weeks because then you have a lot of chronic exposure to the stimulus more opportunity to get gains.”
Mike Israetel opens up on how training beyond six weeks makes you run into a fatigue level
During the conversation, Mike pointed out how training over multiple weeks helps you gain more. Three weeks up, one down, four weeks up, one down, and five weeks up, one down are all great. However, he says that as you get much beyond six weeks, especially if you are training properly, hard, stronger, and bigger over time, the problem you run into is that the fatigue level starts to accumulate exponentially.
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He states that the stimulus starts to peter off. This causes one to end up in weeks seven, eight, and nine. If you keep training, you end up biochemically spinning your wheels. Which then sends a lot of anabolic signaling to the muscles.
However, the accompanying catabolic signaling at this point is high due to high fatigue at a chemical level. This doesn’t allow you to grow much muscle. The unfortunate incident here is that you’re spending two of the hardest training weeks of your last year growing essentially no muscle at all on that balance.
“There is such a thing as too short of a time scale in training two weeks you can do better than that accumulation is a good thing.”
Therefore, Mike says that for many people, six weeks starts to be too much-accumulated fatigue than you’re dealing with. Most people benefit from training for two weeks harder than de-loading. Some people get unbelievable results from training for seven weeks, accumulation, and then just one week of de-loading. In conclusion, he suggests that beginners should take this a little easy but for most people, four to six weeks seems to be the sweet spot.
