Reduce intensity, volume, or both. Find what works for you. Are you best off cutting out your heavy work for a week and keeping things light? Or does hitting a top set and then skipping your higher-volume assistance work help you more? Honestly, just try it out and find what helps you feel better.
When I deload, I take a week or so completely off from the gym and find something else to do. I like to go wrestle with my old high school wrestling team (I’m a volunteer assistant coach), pull my homemade sled, and do some biking or sprinting as well.
Try the deload if you have never done it before. The trick is to write down what your planned deload workout is ahead of time and just stick to it, don’t do anything extra just because you don’t feel the same as a normal workout. Whats your current bench day look like?
I’m assuming youre elbow is functional and you still bench on it? Def need more details about the injury/pain but if it’s only some painful tendinitis doing some very high rep work would be appropriate.
Some examples are taking 1 set of DB presses with 40-60 based on your strength and repping 1 set to failure. Outside of that you do half the work. if you can press 150lb DBs for X reps then just use 75s for the same reps.
The easiest is doing that. Hit half the weight for the normal reps on all those exercises (based on whatever split you do)
Half the weight is a good start. I would also do 2/3 the overall volume and reduce the reps slightly. Three sets of ten with 315 would be two sets of 8 with 165-185 for example. I’d do the same across the board for the other days also.
[quote]gurbob wrote:
so my normal first day of my cycle, would be 4sets of 6 , with 320/330/340/350
so i should do 4 sets of 4 with 240/250/260/270?[/quote]
That should be fine, though some suggest to limit barbells on a deload. Just try it and see. Dont go over 60% of your 1RM for these, generally. I would reduce the weight more than what you have listed, personally.
just limit the acc. work. stick w dumbbell/cables or barbells with higher rep for da pump… then call it a day. You can finish up a deload in about 20-30 minutes after your warmup
If you were doing the 5/3/1 program your deload for bench would look something like this.
Warmup sets - any number of sets/reps with weight less than 165
165 x 5
210 x 5
255 x 5
For accessory lifts there’s no official guidelines but personally I drop the weight to about 80% and slightly less reps, so with dumbells if your top set is 100lbs x 15 for deload do 80lbs x 12 or something like that. Some people might drop weight a lot and do more reps but its easy to go overboard on the reps to make up for lack of weight and that defeats the purpose of deload.
60% of your normal work set weight for the same number of reps is a standard deload and the best according to Zatsiorsky. Should help you recover faster than doing nothing (which sometimes you need to do IMO). Example if you would bench 300x6 instead you bench 180x6 - yes that is super easy and yes that is the point. Anything taken to failure is not a deload, it is simply modifying the training stimulus. So in essence all sets become warm-ups sets, do not increase the reps. If you feel really bad and drained then he recommends doing 30% of 1RM which is super light (90 lbs if you bench 300 for your sets) basically just gets the blood flowing. Do this for 1-3 weeks normally, the longer you have been going intense without a break the longer you will need to deload.
For upper body movements I tend to use plate loaded machines on de-load week. This gives your joints and stabilizer muscles a break and you don’t really get caught up in the weight your lifting. Nobody cares about how much you machine bench lol.