The Science Behind Taking a Week Off (Deloading)

Hey, Athletes! The Science Behind Taking a Week Off (Deloading) - Episode of The Garage Gym Athlete Podcast is up!

The Science Behind Taking a Week Off (Deloading)

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IN THIS 33-MINUTE EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

• Today, Jerred and Joe break down deload weeks
• This study compares two 9 week programs geared toward strength and hypertrophy
• If you do our programming you know we regularly deload
• They give there general recommendations for deloading
• And A LOT MORE!!

Diving Deeper…

If you want to go a little bit deeper on this episode, here are some links for you: 

Reference this study for this week!

• Gaining more from doing less?

Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week 

• The Science Behind Taking a Week Off (Deloading)

Thanks for listening to the podcast, and if you have any questions be sure to add it to the comments below!

To becoming better!

- Jerred

Podcast Transcript

Joe: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast, where we talk about fitness, health, and anything to help you become the most optimal human beings. Let's dive into it.

Jerred: All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast. Jared Moon here with Joe Courtney. What's up, Joe?

Joe: What's up, man? How's it going?

How's your

Jerred: training going? Pretty 1 to 10? 9. How about you?

6. Dang, 6. Yeah, what's going on? What's a six?

Joe: I it's like I want to train more and I'm and better especially running wise But once again, I've got a new ailment to deal with and it's my I've got some wicked heel pain that's been going on So I've had ten I've had Achilles tendonitis in the past for years like decades and it's been manageable and it hasn't really affected me But this heel pain is like directly down low on the heel [00:01:00] and it's like I've been doing stuff with my hip for a while but now my heel is just It just hurts like when I walk, when I get up after a while when I start my run and I just feel like my runs have been a lot slower.

My zone two has been a whole lot slower for some reason as well. So I'm not sure what's going on running wise, but my running has been very much subpar, but I'm still doing it once, sometimes twice a week. I should intervals yesterday. So I'll do a zone two later this week, but yeah, it just hasn't been

Jerred: great.

Just run on your toes, man.

Joe: No, not for zone two. Sprints, yeah, it's one thing, but yeah, no.

Jerred: That's a bummer, man. What are you going to see like a physical therapist or something? So we're

Joe: going to, we're going to San Diego Labor Day weekend and I'm going to see my old PT there. So she can actually get hands on me but I haven't been able to get a referral or anything in Monterey.

There's not a whole lot. It's slim pickings here a little bit when it comes to PT. So I've been trying different things, still do my old PT routines, trying to [00:02:00] do mobilize here and like other parts, just to see if something clicks started doing pliability some a little bit here and there.

So we'll see what, I said started to, I've done it twice.

Jerred: I am a mobility master.

Joe: Yeah, I'm not fixed. I'm not fixed yet, so it must not

Jerred: work. How was it? How was doing some mobility routines, throwing that in there? Are you like super not mobile, immobile? I'm super not

Joe: mobile. So like, when you go through the plyo delivery routine, they're like, remember the person on the right is doing it.

Extra whatever. And the person on the left is deliberately scaling. And I'm like, I'm not even at the person on the left. Come on now. There's some things I'm just like it does hurt. It does. It is uncomfortable. I have to figure out certain ways to do things because even. There's certain poses where it's okay, you go down to your forearms or whatever, and I'm like, I'm not there.

I like, or Hey, just go down to your palms. No, dude, I got to do like my fists or one hour at a time because I just can't get that far, but it's, I do like it. I, it, I'm 100% prefer it over yoga because I remember when I first asked you guys about it, I was like, okay, I need [00:03:00] a mobility routine.

That's not WUSA yogi, type of thing. I just need some like decent mobility and pliability work. Pliability is good. It's simple. You can choose the length of time. So I just do the 20 minute ones and it's been good.

Jerred: Yeah, they're solid. I've used them for a while. I would say I'm closer to the person doing it as hard, like the harder version, except for some moves I'm not, and in some moves I just feel it differently than what they're wanting to do over and over again.

But training for me has been good. I'm running a lot, doing a lot of calisthenics work. I'm throwing in a little bit more resistance training on top of the calisthenics. I feel like I'm in a huge experimentation mode right now with stuff. And I've been actually really enjoy doing this and just testing things frequently and seeing what's not working and what is working.

But I feel like my body caught up to the calisthenics volume really fast to where I think I, I don't know. I think I did three cycles of that. So almost three months. Of like the one man system, [00:04:00] but I was going into a fourth cycle. And I was like, I just don't even feel it anymore. Like it's, I don't think I'm best.

Yeah, I switched to the vest, but the vest has pros and cons, right? Like of what you're able to do, and then you take the vest off and you don't necessarily get better at doing more push ups because it's just making you stronger, right? So that's why I'm like experimenting with how do I do the vest on some movements, but not all the movements?

And so that's where that kind of experimentation method comes in because you can do a lot of push ups with a vest on But like I said, it doesn't mean you're going to be able to do more with the vest off. So I'm still trying to balance how do I get a little bit stronger? How do I add more? Muscular endurance here.

Cause I'm still not where I want to be in like the minute tests. I'd say cardiovascularly, the runs are going better than anything else. I've hit a couple of PRs on five miles, six mile runs. So all that's trending in the right direction for the most part. What if you

Joe: change up the movement?

[00:05:00] Do ring dips instead of pushups for

Jerred: a cycle? Yeah, see, those are the things that I'm like playing with is I'm not changing the movement the full time, but it's like, Hey, maybe for a dynamic. This cycle, I won't do pushups dynamically. I'll do yeah. Ring dips or something else or add a I think I already mentioned, like I stopped doing purely calisthenics on legs because.

I felt like my legs were getting almost no work at all. So I added I added some weighted lunges and belt squats and things like that. Still things that aren't like heavy loaded barbells and stuff, but I'm just trying to add some other things. So a lot of experimentation, but jotting everything down so I can hand it over to the garage gym athlete community at some point, once it's all refined and ready for publishing.

Yeah, that's great. But let's get into some science today. We're going over deloads, pretty cool study. So the name of the study is gaining more from doing less. The effects of a one week deload period [00:06:00] during supervised resistance training on muscular. adaptations. So they had 39 men and women. So I think it was like 29 men and 10 women.

And they wanted to see what would happen when they took a one week break from nine weeks of resistance training. So they were randomly split into two groups. So you essentially have this nine week resistance training program and one group would do the full nine weeks resistance training. The lower body stuff was supervised by.

The research staff, but the upper body stuff wasn't, they were able to do that on their own. Just an interesting point. I don't know why they decided to do that. I think it said just to where the researcher weren't overloaded. Workload. So anyway, one group just plowed through the full nine weeks and then one group took a one week off.

So basically did eight weeks worth of training in a nine week time period. So you had the delude, delude [00:07:00] group in the other group. And they were looking at three different things. They were looking at muscle size. So hypertrophy did muscles grow, shrink, stay the same. They also looked at overall strength, how strong did the athletes get between the start and finish of the program and ultimately some muscular endurance parameters.

A pretty cool study overall. We haven't, I haven't seen one like this on deload specifically. And I'll cut to the chase of kind of what they found and then we can. Give our thoughts on it, but ultimately it seemed like for muscle strength, a D load was not advantageous. So if you just want to get stronger, it probably makes sense.

In this study, because I have a lot to say once we're done with the science stuff at science stuff, probably makes sense just to train for the nine weeks straight and you'll get stronger for muscle hypertrophy, a [00:08:00] different story. It was, they were about the same. They're really close to the same, not a lot of difference between taking a week off and working out the full nine weeks.

So that's good. If you're looking to gain more muscle mass and you want to take some time off. And then some of the muscular endurance markers were also more like the hypertrophy markers, not necessarily better or worse, just the same. So really it only seems to affect strength overall. So that's the main takeaway is based off of your goal, you might have a different takeaway from all of that information.

But D loads are not as helpful for strength. Don't really, doesn't really matter for hypertrophy. What'd you think about this study and some of the takeaways?

Joe: So as I thought more about the study, this was a great example of how a single study could be used to shape an argument of. Any different side of whatever wants to say, because, giving some context or certain looking at it from a certain way, you could say D [00:09:00] loads are good.

You could say D loads doing don't do anything for you. And I think D loads are a bit more complicated than that. I think they would need. Like a bigger, this might, again, this is like a first step study, but it needs more because deload is so much more than just what they did. So I think it was good to see that, on the positive taking 1 week off essentially didn't have much of an impact at all in the grand scheme of things.

And while the strength and some of the benefits. Would, strength, it makes sense, a very acute benefit for nine weeks, but like how long would that continue 12, 15, will you plateau, will you break how would that work on the longer run for what they were doing? So I think and how they deloaded also matters because they.

Did nothing. So they don't seem to, yeah. Yeah. So we deload, we do body geometry and zone two. So we still do stuff there. And some of the athletes complain that it's even harder some weeks than regular weeks. So [00:10:00] that's also makes a difference. If you just stop doing something for a week and then you come back and then you're going to be super sore yeah, you didn't do anything for a week.

But if you just did very minimal, even if it's calisthenics, I think it would have made a bigger difference. So I think this was. Hey it's good to take a look at Deload to see how it impacts, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't do a whole lot for either changing minds, but I think it's a good way to look at just how I'll Deload can be, what about you?

Jerred: Yeah that's when you land in the middle of these, it's not there's not an advantage. So it's like you could train either way. It's it doesn't mean one's better than the other in the short term, nine weeks. Yeah, you're going to get stronger if you don't take some time off. But ultimately you can pick what you want to do here.

If you want to take a full week off from your training, I think this data and this study should be more encouraging than not, because we might all have a week like that, or maybe you have a week like that in your life where something happens because I know some people who [00:11:00] mentally. It's detrimental mentally for them to take a week off.

Like they just think that they're regressing and things are not moving the way they should. And I think your mindset around a deload is very important too. So like how you feel about taking that time off. So if you do have to take a time off, I think a big takeaway here is it's not going to hurt you that bad.

Especially if you're just looking to grow muscle and muscular endurance in the strength. Yeah, it might not benefit you. But at the same time, your point is like, where does that end? Because we all know you can't just get stronger every week continuously. Forever because you can't get strong for that long.

You would eventually be the strongest person in the world. So there are going to be other factors. So I don't even think, I don't really like this study in general terms, to be honest, I think all this study really showed me. is that you can take a week off completely, and it's okay.

That's my ultimate takeaway. You can take a week off, [00:12:00] completely off, abstain from any form of exercise, and it's okay.

Joe: Especially strength wise. Yeah, strength is harder to lose. Cardio, though, pfft, good luck.

Jerred: Yeah, cardio goes much faster. It's honestly, cardio is It's like blowing up a balloon.

I think I've given this example on a podcast before, but your cardio respiratory fitness is like blowing up a balloon, but then taking your mouth off the balloon, without you're not, you're unable to pinch the balloon closed, right? Cardio respiratory fitness is just a balloon that has to constantly be blown up, and then if you want to take a breath off the balloon that's fine, but you will be losing air out of that balloon for every second you decide to take off.

So endurance training is a lot less forgiving with taking time off. It doesn't mean you shouldn't deload appropriately. And the reason I say that's my only takeaway is because nine weeks, and I'm not faulting the study because what are we going to do like a three year study? But nine weeks is too short of a timeframe to look at.

I think that they pulled some cool, interesting data here, but [00:13:00] one who deloads by taking a full week off. I don't even call that deload. I literally just call that a week off. I don't call it a deal. A deal to me is always about reduction in training volume. So typically we're looking for about a 50% reduction in training volume.

And I think you could even do this. You do this with running. You could do this with lifting. I think it's just good for reasons beyond your physiology. And it has more to do with your psychology that you just need this time off eventually. And I think that everyone's different. Like we have standardized our deload weeks of lesser volume and different exercises and lesser intensity.

We've standardized it, but I think that you could really individualize your deloads on just how you're feeling. If you're paying attention to a lot of your metrics, like HRV, how you're feeling, how many sick days have you had over the last year? All of those kinds of things. If you're really paying [00:14:00] attention to those things and just your energy, when you wake up, how motivated are you to train a lot of these subjective and objective data, I think you can make a better decision on okay, I think.

My numbers aren't improving, I'm actually getting a little bit slower in my run times, I'm not feeling good in lifting, my HRV's been screwed up my urine color's super dark in the mornings, I don't think I'm getting enough water, my sleep's messed up I'm not very motivated to train, I just really don't want to train I'm not, I don't like to throw around the word overtraining because it's like in the in the nutrition world, if you say detox I'm gonna, I'm gonna detox.

Everyone will jump on you for you don't know what detox means, there can't be toxic things in your blood they get super, stupid. Nutritional wise on it, yeah. Yeah, on nutrition stuff. And I think the same thing is for overtraining. When you say overtraining PhDs are like, you don't even know what overtraining is.

Overtraining is where you're basically dying and you have to take, you don't see any improvement for months at a time whatever. So I'm not talking about overtraining. I'm just [00:15:00] saying you're not feeling right. Things are not normal for you. That might be okay. Let's take some reduction in training volume or a full week off.

And you're ultimately going to be fine. So like I said, we structure hours, but if you want to do, if you want to do it more based off of the individual, you absolutely can taking into account all the things that I was mentioning and now with strength. You brought up this point, like it's only nine weeks.

You can't go on forever. So I think deloading just has to happen in a strength program. Every great powerlifting coach. Every power lifting book you read, they have D loads, they have tapers so to think that you could just do strength training without taking time off is silly. I think maybe if you were trying to get a, to a certain strength level by a certain date.

But even then you probably have a really good powerlifting coach that would have you taper two to four weeks before the competition. So you are peaking at the right time and it still wouldn't just be like, all right, my powerlifting meet is in nine weeks. I'm going to train as hard as I can [00:16:00] up until the ninth week and then hit PRs.

That's probably not going to work out for you either. Cause it's a little bit more taxing once you go into competition. So anyway, I think that you shouldn't take a full week off unless you absolutely need it. I wouldn't take a full week off and this is coming more from the habitual side of things.

I think, when you open that door, it's like Pandora's box, right? It's very hard to close if you start going down that route. It's if you intentionally take seven days off, and then you roll into a busy week where the kid doesn't sleep, or, something happened at work, or there's an emergency, Or whatever.

Now, what if that rolls into, of the last 14 days, I've only trained three. And then something happens that next week because you know what? Life is what life is. And now you've only trained six days out of the last 21. And now we're just getting behind, so like I would never intentionally take a full seven days off.

I definitely deload. [00:17:00] I think that's very helpful mentally and everything else. But habitually, I think that you should always be in the habit of, if it's waking up early for you in training, doing that. But if it's working out at two o'clock in the afternoon, at least. Still hold that timeframe to do something, go for a walk, like whatever your deload activity is.

But I think a deload has a lot of pros mentally, psychologically, and can help you recover and everything else. But I don't think that you should take a full week off.

Joe: Yeah, I've had. Plenty of down weeks or travel weeks when we travel, but basically anytime we travel, I'm taking my running shoes because I can run anywhere and let's, unless it's winter because I'm a big baby, but either way, I'm taking my running shoes.

And then when we just did our traveling in June we took bands. So we would do like a calisthenic or band day, and then there would be a running day and it was just, that's just what we did. And it wasn't, no Liz has been on a strength program for a while and that's her main goal right now is strength, but she was fine just doing body weight stuff because it was fine.

It was good. It's good to take a [00:18:00] little bit of a break whilst we were traveling. So it's not like we had to stress about it. And then this past week, or even when I've gotten sick, like sometimes I'll do an every other day approach and at the minimum, I'll go out and do 30 minutes of, even if it's calisthenics or I'll do my PT routine.

Like I have a whole bunch of PT exercises and I so work for certain things and get on the bike a little bit. Even that for 30 minutes has been better than just doing absolutely nothing because even though I know strength won't matter that much, I still want to get a blood flow going to all the area, all the essential areas.

So that when I am able to get back to it, I know I'm not, I don't have this big epically sore session that happens, or I just feel like I'm trudging uphill.

Jerred: Yeah. I think for traveling, I used to be way more lax. About what I would do when I would travel. I'd be like, Ah, you know what, you're on vacation, or you're on a trip.

If you skip today don't worry about it. Not that big of a deal. But I know for a family vacation, that actually just makes me worse. I'm a worse version of myself [00:19:00] when I don't train. And that's the last thing I want, is to be a worse version of myself on a family vacation. I'd rather be the best, happier version of myself, which includes me exercising.

So what I typically do on vacations or trips now is I just only make it my problem, right? Like I only make it my problem. So if that means I have to wake up at 5 a. m. on vacation to go train, I'm going to do that and I'm not going to bother anyone else. And that's going to be fine as opposed to trying to do it in the middle of the day when like we might be wanting to go somewhere, do something.

So I'm still really strict even on vacation these days. I didn't used to be, but I just feel like trips pop up and the more you get into that mentality again, it's the more like. If you had six to eight trips this year between work and vacation and everything else, and all of those trips, you decided to just not train or not do something again that's a lot of time.

It's a significant portion of the year that you've slacked off. So anyway, rounding back to, to de load how we de load [00:20:00] specifically at garage gym athlete is very different from this. So I didn't see a lot of correlation to. What does this mean for garage gym athletes following our training?

And so Joe, you mentioned it and I want to talk about how we deload a little bit more in this episode. So people are aware. So we do three weeks of training and we deload the fourth, which some people would find excessive if it was a true deload, like abstinence from exercise, like they talked about here, that would be way too much, but that's not what we do.

So we have three. Progressive weeks. So week one and then week two is a little bit harder than week one. And then week three is a little bit harder than week two. So that's progressive in nature. And then our fourth week, when we deload, we back down, we do Joe mentioned, we do body geometry, which is like super set strength training that hits every plane of movement and every muscle contraction.

And so we're making sure body geometry for us is [00:21:00] injury proofing. So it's typically. Not as hard. I say that, but it can be very challenging. And it can still be like very muscularly demanding, like your muscles can burn, but we're a little bit more in a, like a hypertrophy zone that fourth week and not as much functional.

Like for hard to kill tracks specifically or injury, you're not doing like super hard intervals or something else. So our body geometry is making sure that you're hitting every plane of movement, because one major flaw in most programs. Is they don't focus on the different planes of movement.

And then when your body naturally moves in a plane of movement that you have not exercised in or practice, that's where injuries come from. That's how someone who lifts 500 pounds gets hurt when they bend over to pick up, a straw off the ground or like whatever, right? This is how the, this is how you accumulate injuries easily in.

Everyday, ordinary, mundane tasks in your life is because you weren't exercising all the different planes of movement. So we're making sure that you see all the different [00:22:00] planes of movement. If not in the three weeks. Progressive period in the fourth week, we will make sure that you get all of those. And then we're also making sure that you hit every muscle contraction.

So everyone knows there's eccentric and concentric muscle contractions, right? So eccentric is the lengthening of the muscle. So if you're to think about bicep curl, it's the lowering of the weight. Concentric is when you'd be lifting the weight back up when the weight is getting smaller, it's contracting.

But then there's also a third, which is isometric. So when you're holding that muscle in place typically contracted or halfway contracted, or, it could be a number anywhere else, but you're holding it.

And a lot of times if coaches can overlook having any kind of isometric contractions in their training or they don't have enough loading on concentric and [00:23:00] eccentric motions. If they wanted to do different types of squat, if you're doing banded or something like that, You can load concentric and eccentric differently.

And if you're getting, if you're getting too carried away with that, you might need to even things out, or maybe you need to add more bands or chains, or maybe you need to do reverse banded squats or something like that. And I don't want to get too complicated here, but if these things aren't matched, if all you ever do is squat up and down.

With a barbell and that's all you ever did. Yeah, that's great. It worked for a long time, but you'd probably still end up with an injury because you're not getting in different planes of movement and really you might be getting more either eccentric or concentric, probably concentric benefit to squatting than you would be getting eccentric and there are different ways to get more eccentric benefit from squatting Without having to just only do the squat movement.

So again, not trying to get too complex there, but ultimately you want to be seeing all these different muscle contractions to help injury proof yourself. And then also you want to be able to see all the different planes of movement. So that's what we're doing in our deload weeks. And it's typically at a reduced [00:24:00] volume than the previous three weeks were.

And then we do zone two. So typically we have a couple of 15 minute zone two sessions thrown in there. And then one longer. Zone two session in there. And honestly, I encourage more, we only program the four days per week. And so that's what we program in those four days. But I would encourage you to do even more zone two in those DLOAD weeks if you want to get even more benefit from it.

So we're, we've, and we've been doing this for years. So that's what our DLOAD weeks look like. We don't add stain from exercise. We reduce volume and we do a different type of training. So to call it DLOAD in the same fashion of this research study is not even close to the same. And then we don't ever take, we never have full weeks off.

That's at the discretion of the athlete. So if you wanted to take a full week off for Christmas or whatever, again, make that decision around your objective and subjective measures, whatever you have there and then you can take some time off, but that's how we do D load. There's a cool study about D load, but ultimately I don't think that [00:25:00] helpful for the garage team athlete, unless you want to know that it's okay, that you can still grow your muscles and take a week off.

But you might be a little less strong if you're going for it. So not nothing groundbreaking here from the study as far as I'm concerned.

Joe: But always good to remind people about deload.

Jerred: What do you do for deload? I know sometimes we don't do what's programmed, sometimes we do what's programmed.

What do you do?

Joe: Most times I will do what's on there. But it's sometimes going by feel because it all depends on what weeks are going on. Sometimes I'll take that time to do an extra like interval day on top of some zone two. Or I will hit up some other supersets that I just feel like I, I've needed to do.

But for the most part, I will, I'll. I'll do at least half, maybe two of the strength days, and then I'll do some other things that I might fill in to see what I just feel like what I'm lacking.

Jerred: Yeah, most people love body geometry stuff anyway, because it's it's just fun to do, I like that style of training

Joe: it's also typically different than what we're doing in the program in any way.

So it's Oh, [00:26:00] hey, here's something fresh for a week. And then going back

Jerred: right now, because I'm just doing my own programming and I'm programming, I'm training, honestly, probably seven days a week, six sometimes, but I'm hit, I'm training almost every day with this running calisthenics program. Right now, I'm not deloading at all.

And so I'm, Just paying attention to everything very closely because I'm not trying to injure myself But again, I'm not messing with like heavy loads or anything like that. I don't feel like I'm overtaxing anything So I'm paying attention to everything that I mentioned earlier Like I woke up two days ago and I had a little bit of a sore throat and I was like, Okay, maybe pushing it too hard and that was just like it that was the only thing I noticed All my metrics were still, HRV was good.

Everything's good. But I was like, I have a little bit of a sore throat. I don't normally ever get sick. I've been training seven days a week for going on four months. I was like, okay, I took the day off.[00:27:00] And that was, it was a Sunday. I just lined up and I was like, I'm just gonna take the day off.

Probably didn't need to. Because I was fine Monday, like I was fine that next day, but I'm still like being very cautious of all these things and not pushing it once I notice something. So if I notice increased resting heart rate, I really don't pay attention to HRV that much. A little bit.

I do look at it. But I've never really truly had it coincide. I've been sick and had high HRV before, I just, it doesn't always, it's not that helpful, but resting heart rate is typically a little bit better. If you see that trending in the wrong direction, something might be going on.

And then one, seriously, one of the biggest things, and I mentioned it earlier is just, how do I feel about training right now? If I don't want to train at all, something's off. I probably need a day or two rest over the next seven days. If I just. I have no desire to train like I'd feel like something's off.

So those are the things that I'm paying attention to right now a lot with training basically every day of the week and[00:28:00] making sure that I don't get injured and I'm feeling okay.

Joe: Yeah. Resting out right in body temperature for sure are the ones that I mostly pay attention to.

Sometimes respiratory rate. It's been a little bit hit or miss on that, but. You mentioned sore throat last week. I had a wicked bad sore throat. I was pretty sure I had hand, foot and mouth, so it got so bad to where I couldn't eat solid foods for two to three days, so I was on a liquid diet.

So for two to three days I was at like, I was only getting 12 to 1500 calories because there's only so much I can drink. It was like two smoothies and some bone broth. I didn't even think to do like oatmeal till later on, but still like I was really very much depleted. So the, it started on Monday.

I started to get a sore throat and I was like. Okay. It was one of those where I looked at my recovery stuff. I'm like, okay my, my recovery score isn't like the best, but it's not the worst. So I can push through and I can do a regular workout Tuesday. It got worse. So I was like, all right, I'm going to do a zone two bike.

Cause with that, for some reason I had a bunch of like spots on my feet and my feet for like sore, which is weird. It's okay, I'm gonna do zone two bike. And then Wednesday it got, it was [00:29:00] like. Tuesday, I started to get peak bad because that's when I started eating not very much. So Wednesday I was like, all right, I might be on like 1200 calories.

I still feel crappy, probably can't train that much. But I went out and did a 20 minute alternating EMOM of calisthenics with a vest on, and then I did pliability stretching. It's okay, that's what I'm doing for today. I'm not going to do a really high intense day. And then Thursday, I think I did a short zone two run.

Like three to four miles. And that was basically my week. Like I, everything was a whole lot lower because I was in such a big calorie deficit. That was the most thing, main thing I was worried about, like having a sore throat sucked. But it was also just, I just had zero energy because I wasn't able to eat

Jerred: enough.

Yeah. Getting enough calories is. It's massively important if you're going to continue to train, that's funny that we both had sore throats and we don't work together in person to person, 2, 000 miles away. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe something can be transmitted through zoom, who knows? All right.

I think that's it for this one. [00:30:00] Listen to your body. If you really just want someone else to program your deload weeks for you just sign up for garage gym athlete training. So you can go to garage, gym athlete. com and sign up for free trial. And don't worry about deloads, we got it programmed for you and we're doing all the things that I mentioned with different planes of movement, different muscle contractions, zone two work and we've been doing that for years, a lot of our athletes.

Really enjoy the deload weeks. So come join us for all of our athletes who are doing all the things, you're getting your green dots and training, you're finishing the training sessions. You're hitting your deload, all that kind of stuff. Really appreciate you being a part of the community and getting in all the training that you can and being as consistent as possible.

It really does help you the most, but also helps garage gym athlete as well. So we really appreciate the community and everything. You all do as you stick around and push forward with us. That's it for this one. Remember if you don't kill comfort will kill you.[00:31:00]