Blog Post: Whats a “De-load”??

Hello CBDer’s! How are we enjoying the crisp beautiful sunshine we are experiencing here in Melbourne town this week??

We wanted to take a few moments to keep you in the loop of whats a going on at the RoD training wise. Its has been a helluva few weeks up here & we have seen some tremendous training going down from all corners. You’ve really been shifting some heavy weights and moving things nice & swiftly too (thus sticking to CrossFit’s “move large loads, long distances & quickly” philosophy).

You have powered on for a good few weeks now & we Coaches are really proud. Every so often however we all need to back it off a touch to reset the wiring so to speak. This is called taking a “Deload”. Some of you may be all too aware of what this is. others not so much. We thought we would take a moment to explain what it is & why we implement it.

Quite simply a Deload is a period of time in which you take things easier in the Box by lifting lighter weights &/or reducing your training volume. Deloads will typically last a week and they encourage recovery before another period of harder training which inevitably involves heavier loading & more volume*, etc. Even if your body doesn't absolutely need to deload, it's a good idea to have one

*volume for us is defined by either the total amount of repetitions you perform through that particular session or by the total amount of kilos being lifted in a given task.

To an uninitiated outsider of CrossFit (or any decent exercise/strength program for that that matter), deloads can seem like a waste of time, or an excuse to sit on your butt for a week, watching TV instead of hitting the gym and shifting some heavy lumps of weight. Nothing could be further from the truth! You simply can’t just go "HAM" day-in, day-out ALL the time. Your body will simply not cooperate. Think we are wrong? Go ahead & think back to a time where you felt your squat/press/deadlift/OLY lift plateaued (or even gotten weaker!), or that time you felt “flat” during such & such a WoD, or this one time you felt “off”, trained hard as anyway then next day - bam! you get two coldsores & the flu!

These are all sign of overtraining or training at full tilt for too long a period. Not fun to hear hey? When we start CrossFit we go through various phases of being a CrossFitter (This subject alone probably warrants its own post sometime in the future as lots of these phases are very funny). One of them being the “Superhero” phase. This is where you believe that because you do CrossFit nothing will ever harm you, not even training 12 weeks straight at your body’s maximum output in EVERY session. Sorry, it doesn't work that way.

Normally it takes something to happen to you to make you realise that you are not immortal (as sucky as that is). you may get sick or a niggle that means you have to scale a WoD (shock-horror!). Once you are back on track its very easy to forget everything that led to this point & you go back to training “HAM”. We don’t want you to get that niggle or get sick due to training too much. We want to head this off before it ever comes.

This is where your lovely Coaching team at CBD come in! This is why you are a member here with us. We are forever grateful & humbled by you putting your Health & Fitness in our hands. It brings us no end of joy to help you achieve whatever goals you set yourself and play a small part in your journey. But we take our roles very seriously & we think long & hard about your program and how we can get the best results for everybody without breaking you all (physically we mean! lol). This is why we plan in “Back-off” weeks every 4-6 weeks or so.

We monitor every single workout. We look for feedback & review from our coaches from every class they take. Who’s going well, who is struggling. How did the ‘group' fare with this & that. Can we push on another week or do we need to ease off? These are the key indicators we look to for your future programming. That we believe is one of the things that makes us a bit different, being that we cater for whats actually in front of us, not just draw up the most fancy, perfect looking 12 week plan to which 3 weeks in may not be working or worse still you are not enjoying yourselves. Don't be confused now, we very much have training outcomes & goals in place for you in the short, medium & long term buy we do NOT plan 10 weeks out & "see what happens".

Some of you are more adept at recognising the signs the overtraining / fatigue & some are not. Its actually quite hard sometimes to see them. This is why we will take the mantle, as we should, and implement the back-off for you. This current week marks our latest “Back-off”. It will last Monday-Friday. Each days “WoD" will be prescribed as low-meduim volume, low-meduim weights. We still however still want some intensity in there where we can. Just because the loads are lower does not mean we want you to try any less. The one exception will be your back squats 5x5.

Finally we are also implementing some mobility drills into each weekday this week (post WoD) to help educate, or re-educate for those in the know, on how to promote good recovery after you have thrown-down. We will focus on a different spot (or spots) each day & we hope you will take on board some notes going forward. We’d love to see a bit more pro-activness when it comes to your recovery work. CrossFit is a tough program anyways but it is made easier if you help yourself after your class and spend 10-20 minutes rolling, flossing, tacking, stretching, etc. Please try to afford yourself more time AROUND your class time for this kind of stuff. Do your body a good service & book out more than just 45 minutes in your day for your "me time", allowing 60-65 minutes should do it. We always try to do a cool down but in reality your entire body has gone through a stressful ordeal & needs more TLC & downtime with a roller afterwards. It will make your body a bit more receptacle to the rigours of this awesome program.

So to summerise all you need to do is keep turning up to class, follow our lead & we will take care of the rest. Next week it'll be on again!