The Ideal Training Program

Three Principles to Optimise Your Routine

The Week That Was

Thanks for reading the first edition last week! It was great to hear from readers all over the world, including some long time readers that I hadn’t connected with for a couple of years.

As I mentioned in the previous edition, my current training had me in the middle of a deload. A deload week is a temporary reduction in volume to give the body a break and freshen up before a new phase of training.

For clients and myself, we rarely schedule deload weeks because they tend to occur naturally when work or family gets busy and training has to go on the backburner for a week or so. However, there are times when training is consistent and a scheduled break is beneficial.

A simple way to deload is to reduce volume by 50%. You can do this by doing half the amount of training sessions, weights or sets. I typically do the same number of sessions with reduced weight, but this time I tried cutting down on sessions.

This wasn’t a great idea. Training less frequently just made the week seem like a waste of time and I had less motivation to train at all. I didn’t train until Wednesday and then did my sessions consecutively over three days.

Next time I need to deload, I’ll go back to keeping session frequency as is and reducing the weights instead. This maintains the routine, minimises disruption and although lifting greatly reduced weights can seem futile halfway through a session, the fact I’m there means I will see it out.

I’m back into a new training phase this week and working towards the same strength and fitness goals discussed in the first edition. With six weeks left until Christmas, that’s a nice training phase to be able to see some results before the inevitable deload that occurs in the week between Christmas and New Year.

---

Optimising Your Training Routine

Nutrition is an intricate topic and such an important part of body recomposition, which means it gets the lion’s share of attention and articles. There are so many different aspects to discuss and experiences to share, that once you think everything has been covered, it’s time to go back and update it.