Although I hate the word deload, because when most athletes hear that word they don't take the week seriously and they don't get the benefit of the week. A deload, or transition, or pivot week whatever you want to call it, has it's place in everyone's training plan if they are training hard enough. I am deloading right now after pushing training hard for 14 weeks without one. This may seem odd to some because a lot of people see deloads come about every 3-5 weeks which to me is just a bit ridiculous if you are doing your own programming. If you have a coach then it makes a bit more sense because true communication between a coach and lifter very rarely exists so it is generally more of a guessing game of when to put one in. If you are doing your own stuff which I highly recommend everyone do for some time before hiring a coach you can plan your deloads based on how you feel and not by some predetermined number of weeks.
How I deload may be a bit different than other people so I wanted to take a second and discuss how I approach it and my thought process behind it. When I deload I usually use it as a week of new movements going into my next block. This new stimulus will allow me to still adapt to training even under a lower than normal effort just because of the unfamiliarity of the new exercises. That is step one, the next step is I lower the volume by half, so if I am doing a top set and a backdown set I would just negate the backdown set. So however it is your training is set up you would drop the volume for the week in half. The last thing I look to do is keep my load/intensity pretty high, for example, if I usually push my top set to a failure point of 8-10 reps, this week I would stop 1-2 reps shy of failure.
I have found that for me and a lot of my clients if the load drops significantly that the following week they are supposed to be back into full-on training they feel off and sluggish. Keep in mind that most fatigue comes from volume accumulation, so by dumping the volume in half will do most of the work. Dropping intensity/load by 10-15% will be enough to recover the rest of the body along with the new exercise selections, whilst keeping your body primed to jump right back into things. This will also force the lifter to take the week a little more seriously and focused on the task at hand.
