Pushing your limits in the gym is essential to build muscle and get stronger, with progressive overload and working to failure both proven principles when it comes to the gym. Every once in a while, though, it pays to dial things back a bit.
Even bodybuilding legend Dorian Yates, who became famed for his low-volume, high-intensity approach and champions the concept of training to failure, sees the merits in scaling the intensity of sessions back every five or six weeks. As he describes, doing so allows the body time to recover and absorb the training you’ve already done.
‘I believe that it’s a good idea to cycle the intensity of your workouts,’ Yates says. ‘What I personally did, and what I’d recommend, is to take it ‘easy’ for a week after six weeks of brutal, intense training. So it’d be a deload week where you would either take the week off – especially if you’ve hit a plateau – or drop most of the intensity of your training.
‘It’s extremely, actually pretty impossible, to train with my level of intensity all year round without any sort of rest – it’ll take its toll on your CNS (central nervous system). Rest and recovery is when the growth happens.’
Yates argues that consistently training to failure creates accumulated fatigue, which will eventually impact your ability to lift so intensely after a few weeks. So, rather than pushing through that fatigue, he instead advocates for completing an easy week of training that involves using lighter weights and not pushing too hard.
It’s an approach backed by science. Research has proven that periodised training, which manipulates intensity, volume and rest over specific time frames, helps to maximise performance and prevents overtraining in the long run, keeping an individual both motivated and limiting the risk of injury.
A couple of times a year, Yates even suggests taking a full week off to get adequate recovery. ‘When I had a gym, guys would say, “I’m stuck on this”. So, I would tell them to take a week off, come back in a week and tell me how they feel. They’d say, “Wow, I came back and I was stronger” – yeah, no shit man, it’s because you’ve rested. You’ve let your body rest and rebuild, so let that be a lesson to you,’ he adds.
