Hey Athletes! Want to learn why we deload at Garage Gym Athlete? Then tune into this week’s episode of Ask Me Anything!
Episode 33 of Ask Me Anything is up!
Ask Me Anything: Why do we deload at Garage Gym Athlete?
In this week’s episode of Ask Me Anything, Jerred and beardless Joe answer Victor’s question. He asked why we choose to deload every four weeks. The guys talk about why deload is important and why we here at Garage Gym Athlete program it the way we do.
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Related Resources at End of Three Fitness:
- Garage Gym Equipment and Deadlift Velocity
- How to Flip the Switch with CrossFit Games Athlete Carleen Mathews
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To becoming better!
Jerred
Transcript:
Ask Me Anything: Why do we deload at Garage Gym Athlete?
[00:00:00] Jerred Moon: Welcome to garage the math. He asked me anything. It’s pretty simple. I’ll be answering questions from the thousands of athletes that follow our daily programming. If you have a question or topic you want submitted, go to dot com slash AMA. Let’s get started.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the garage gym athlete podcast chairman here with Joe Courtney. What’s up, Joe?
Joe Courtney: Hi,
Jerred Moon: what’s funny. So I don’t actually know when this is going to be published. and you’re actually kind of responsible for that. So you can pick whenever you want it to be published, but Joe doesn’t have a beard anymore, and this might be, might be old news because in the.
The main, like the longer weekly podcast, I’m definitely going to mention it. And that one asked to be published. It has to be published, but,
Joe Courtney: yeah. And it doesn’t want to be a week behind.
Jerred Moon: This will be when [00:01:00] people see it, at least. So if you are listening, Joe, I guess you got haircut too. I don’t, I don’t even remember your hair.
All I ever looked at.
Joe Courtney: Oh, it was, yeah. I got a big thing that came before the beard. That was more important.
Jerred Moon: Yeah. So he’s a. Clean shaven took about finally 10 years off of your appearance there.
Joe Courtney: It really felt like it as I was doing it, it was ridiculous.
Jerred Moon: Well, welcome back to normal Joe relative
Joe Courtney: relative.
Jerred Moon: Well, that, that means good things are coming, right. So very
Joe Courtney: much so, so that’s, that’s really the GDA podcast.
Jerred Moon: Sorry, the Monday episodes banana here. We’ll get into the question. I kinda mentioned this on a podcast already, but I want to talk about it more. You have three specific and not just, Research.
So in the, the I’ll read Victor’s question first. So this is Victor and the question is I get that de-load weeks are important to training. However, is there any science behind how free frequently they should be done in our GGA training? For example, it’s [00:02:00] every four weeks, is this based on some literature or simply convenience?
Thanks. And I did mention if you guys listened to the. Muscle type podcast. I briefly mentioned how there was a study talking about how de-load weeks help are beneficial for both slow Twitch and fast Twitch muscle fibers. It’s that kind of the recovery process. and so there is research, but I don’t think that, you know, there you go, it could get, you could look this up and find a lot of conflicting research is my answer to his art.
Is there a research, Into this, any science behind it and there is, and that’s what, when you look at serious athletes and we’re talking about, you know, professional athletes, there’s always some sort of taper or de-load before training or competition. Cause you just don’t want to be hitting, I’m hitting it up.
Like, you know, tap like heavily hitting the CNS and like all of [00:03:00] these, like heavyweights and all that stuff before you have an upcoming event. And so it makes a lot of sense in the professional athlete world, but why do we do it? And, you know, I, I took this a lot from, to be honest, our training methodology, one of the big influences on me early on was Louie Simmons, Westside barbell.
Now he is primarily a powerlifting, but he just works in these three weeks. What three week waves, for his and programming. And I always thought it was a good idea. And then, you know, I’ve seen the athletes that never do a de-load and never deloading is great when you are. You only want to train for like six months, maybe a year.
And then you feel like getting really burnt out and then getting hurt and then starting that whole process over and over again. but you need to de-load more frequently and I have more to say about it, but I wanna get your thoughts on, on T loads in general, Joe. So when you bring
Joe Courtney: it up, professional sports and things like that.
And my first thought was, have you been really into your, into a sport, whether it’s [00:04:00] collegiate athlete professional, or even just, you, you have your main goal of your sport. Typically you have your off season program and your end season programming, right? And you’re the in season program is again, B is kind of going to be a de-load S because you’re doing some sort of practice skills, things that are specifically for your sport, and then any supplemental training is going to be somewhat of de-load.
But out of season training is going to be much more rigorous because you’re building up to what you’re going to be stressed for stressful for your in season. for us, I wasn’t sure about the timeline wise. I’m just been so used to doing it every four weeks. I think I’ve seen people do it six weeks, which is about right.
And it’s, it’s definitely much more on the, Lower lower intensity
Jerred Moon: scale. Yeah. And so I’ll talk about why we selected the timeframe that we did. So in our, in our coaching program, we teach coaches two different things. We teach them how to program, you know, in a very awesome way, but then we also teach what we call the human element.
And that is the big [00:05:00] reason why we. Do three weeks hard, one week easier. And if you’ve been around GTA for awhile, you know, that dealer weeks are not always like a walk in the park. Sometimes it’s just different and challenging in a different way. And I’m taking all of that into account when we, when we program these things.
But this human element side is, I feel like. If you have a known, like, Hey, I need to try hard. I need to push hard for three weeks and then I get a break mentally. That’s a lot better place to be. And so that’s why a big reason we selected it. Yeah. I did have some influence on from different coaches that, that set it up the similar way.
And. These coaches were seeing results at really high level. And I’m like, why not mimic what the best are doing the best in the world they’re doing? But at the same time, the reason I like it, where it is, cause we could, we could go five weeks on one week off we could do. And it wouldn’t change it to be honest, like he mentioned, like, is it just for convenience?
Like there’s nothing convenient about programming a de-load week, you know? I mean, it doesn’t help [00:06:00] us at all when it’s all programming, right? Like we have to program every week of the year, no matter what. So de-load weeks. To be honest. I don’t even know what the convenience portion is there. It’s just not convenient for us.
We really only do it for the human element side of knowing. And I know I’m the same way. Like, if I, if I have to hit something harder, for a certain amount of time, and then I know I’m going to get to back off, it just keeps me a little bit fresher mentally. And then you come back at the end of a de-load week.
If it’s wasn’t that challenging for you ready to just like. Crush another three week wave. Right? So that’s a big reason we do it. I’m now getting into like how we actually do it and why we have structured the dealer weeks, the way we’ve structured them. Now you would have had to watch one of our garage, Matthew webinars.
I don’t know. This is like two or three ago when I talked about, body geometry and how that fits in. So body geometry. For us in, and you could Google body geometry into three fitness and reading and title tire article about our body geometry thing. But [00:07:00] what we’re, we’re really trying to make sure that all planes of motion, our hit in our programming, all the different muscle contractions, all the different energy systems.
We’re just thinking about a lot of different things. When we program specifically embodied geometry, body geometry is our most, most complex programming. Cause there’s so many things that we’re trying to balance and. We didn’t want to do body geometry and perpetuity. It’s just. Athletes would get bored. It just, like I said, it’s complex programming and, but it’s really good beneficial because when we are making sure that there is absolutely no gaps in your training, like I said, you’re hitting all the different muscle contractions, all the different planes of movement, all the different energy systems, you’re doing these things over and over again.
We’re really balancing you out. And the goal of our body geometry system is to keep athletes healthy, safe, and optimal. That’s the entire theory behind body geometry. So we’re doing a body geometry, Cycle our week, every fourth week. And so those are not, they’re not throw away weeks is the big thing. I want all the [00:08:00] garage, gym athletes to know like some people’s de-load weeks are.
And we used to do this, like, to be honest, you know, we would, we would program, but everything would just be, get cut to 50% volume, or 50% intensity. and we would do that. We’d either do a volume de-load or we do an intensity de-load. On that fourth week. And that just that I didn’t like the structure because it did it almost a lot of athletes kind of treated it as this throw away week, like whatever.
and so moving it to body geometry now where it’s a part of a bigger annual plan to where we’re making sure that you’re getting really balanced out every fourth week, it’s going to help you stay in the game longer. and it’s kinda like if all you like to do is train and then I’m like, Hey, you need to go do some mobility work too.
Yeah, well, I don’t like mobility work. It’s like, that’s okay. But you got to do it right. And that’s how body geometry is. It’s like, yeah, it’s not the same programming that you’ve been following for the last three weeks, but it’s going to help you stay in the game longer. And so that’s how we’re doing it.
at garage gym athlete with our [00:09:00] de-load weeks.
Joe Courtney: Yeah, it can definitely be very refreshing. Another reason why I think we can do it is so it’s pretty typical to have programs, cycles be about 12 weeks and that’s where I was our 12 weeks. So every four weeks or during our de-load every four weeks now breaks it up.
Into three, one month segments, three waves. And I think that helps people get through to be like, okay, instead of looking at starting a program going, Oh my God, I have to do this, you know, after two or three weeks, like, man, I still have X amount of weeks. eight, nine weeks we did this left, but instead you can look at it in one month increments and be like, Oh yeah, cool.
Week three next week. De-load awesome. And then by the end of dealer, we people like are ready to get, we get after the next month. So it helps manageable goals to be smaller. And then still hitting the overall. entire cycle at full ability for beak.
Jerred Moon: Yeah. And it helps us bring people into the program, without massive missing pieces.
And this isn’t a big reason. We did it. Like I already mentioned the reasons we have, have de-load weeks and, and the reasons behind those. But if you are like, if you wanted to join garage, gym athlete [00:10:00] training, and you come in at a week, Eight of a 12 week program and we had no deloads, you’re just going to feel like you’re eight weeks behind, right.
You’re just to be like, ah, what am I doing here? But you can really jump in almost at any point and know that there’s a reset coming, for every athlete and it’s okay. It’s okay to jump in whenever you want to jump in. Yep. That’s fine. All right, Victor, that’s why we do de-load weeks. Hopefully that answered your question.
It’s way a little bit less science. Like there are studies on it, for sure. You could pull those up. If you’re interested in any of the NSCA literature, for like CSCs or T SAC F you can check those things out. I mean, there, there are a lot of science behind it, and just research on people who’ve done it, but to be honest, that’s not a major reason we do it.
We do it for that human element, keeping athletes in the game mentally, and also based off of really successful coaches. Who’ve had a lot of, have produced a lot of results following a similar, similar model. So that’s why we do it. But that is it for this grudge. Your mathlete asked me [00:11:00] anything. If you have a question, go to dot com slash AMA submit your question and we will get to it.
And also if you like this podcast and you’re listening, give us a five star review positive comment. If you’re on YouTube, gives a thumbs up, leave a comment, make sure you subscribe to the channel where you can see. Joe’s shaven face,
Joe Courtney: brand new. It’s like a brand new person. Yeah, you gotta gotta switch it
Jerred Moon: out, but that’s it.
Thanks for watching or listening.
I hope you enjoy. Today’s ask me anything episode. So one more time. If you want to submit a question, topic or idea you can do. so@garagemathlete.com slash AMA and Hey, while you’re there, if you haven’t already sign up for garage, gym athlete membership, we are the best. Community and programming on the internet.
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