Back Off Week

This week will be my back off week, this means I will do lighter training than usual. There will be no heavy lifting this week, I will take a rest from hypertrophy training and my max strength day will be all body weight stuff.

Why?

Because you can't expect to train with the same intensity all year round and continue to get improvements, doing this can actually wear you out to the point where you will give up.

Every 4-6 weeks I will have a back off week, intensity on all routines will be reduced (not easy, just reduced!), for example, on pull ups progression day, instead of doing 20 minutes, this week I will go down to 10 minutes.

The idea behind this type of training is to recover AND improve in all aspects of fitness, so next week I should lift heavier weights etc.....

Here is part of a good article I found on t-nation:

"Back Off and Grow!
by Jack Reape

The Most Important Thing I Know About Training

When I got the opportunity to write an article for T-Nation, I asked myself, "Self, what's the most important thing you could talk about?" The answer was clear: back-off weeks!

Back-off weeks, planned periods of light training, are critical to any serious athlete when structured carefully. Backing off is so important that even those who use steroids need to do it. Problem is, most weight-trained athletes are unable or unwilling to take a break!

Look around your gym. I'll bet you see lifters of all disciplines doing the same sets, reps and weights month after month. You'll hear talk about never missing a workout and how a hardcore attitude is the key to getting bigger and stronger. You'll also see those same people on a plateau so big they probably think the world is flat!

Know a lot of drug-free or non-genetic freaks making constant progress? Probably not.

Unless they grasp the science of adaptation, once they pass the initial phases of training they'll reach a plateau and set up camp there. If you're on that plateau with them, this article will save you years of training frustration and months of pouring over Dr. Mel Siff’s Supertraining.

Let's break down the back-off week so you can start making progress again!


Concentrated vs. Distributed Loading

Siff points out that training loads are either defined as concentrated or distributed loading. Concentrated loading is where your training is such that you can't completely recover from each workout before the next. Distributed loading is where your training load is low enough so that you can fully recover before the next workout or workouts.

In theory, distributed loading is possible, but time under tension is also important. . . in theory. In practice, unless you have no job, no stress, you're on massive amounts of drugs, you eat a ton and sleep a lot (in other words, you're an unmarried pro-bodybuilder), your training is, in reality, concentrated loading.

It's widely accepted that in a concentrated loading cycle you can only go 4-6 weeks maximally without a back-off. While I'm dispensing with lots of boring and technical explanations, if you enjoy this type of thing I strongly advise buying Supertraining and taking a paid leave of absence from your job. This is where my unmarried pro-bodybuilder idea might come in handy.

While 4-6 weeks is a maximum time span, it's not optimal for most lifters. I'm confident that if all of T-Nation reviewed their training logs, the vast majority would discover nothing works for much longer than 3-4 weeks."

There you have it!

Include regular back off weeks in your training cycle and improvements will continue.

Thanks for reading.
Jamie