Tapers and Deloads

Before competition, and general management of your training.

This is a subject that is truly impossible to cover in one article. I know this, as I’ve written about it before on my website, but the art of really understanding how to properly prepare yourself for a tournament, fight, meet, or match of any kind is often one of the best skills a coach and athlete team can have up their sleeve.

The subject of deloads and tapering your training is front of mind for me as the Pan Am Jiu Jitsu Championship is happening this weekend in Florida, and I’ve been managing the taper for one athlete in particular to get him in the best position to take home gold.

I think to properly understand the subject you have to first understand that the whole idea behind tapering and deloading is to manage and lessen fatigue so you are ready to either perform your best, or continuing making progress in training.

Fatigue that you do not manage always undermines strength. As a mentor of mine, Charles Poliquin, once said, “fatigue masks fitness.”

Fatigue

Have you ever gone to the gym one week and done a top set of an exercise, then gone back the following week and been unable to replicate the performance and do the same sets/reps under seemingly the same circumstances? I can assure you that you did not get weaker. You were too fatigued to achieve the same result and display your strength (note: it’s possible accommodation kicked in, but I often think that’s driven by fatigue too).

Fatigue left unmanaged doesn’t really ever let you understand where you’re truly at. Left truly unchecked, it’s the time when injury or other adverse reactions can occur.

In jiu jitsu, this is often why a good coach typically wants you to take a few days easier prior to a tournament: they want you fresh and ready to go.

Differences in Deloading: Weight Room vs. Training Jiu Jitsu

From here, this discussion should divulge separately in 2 categories: lifting and jiu jitsu.

Let’s start with lifting.

Deloading Lifting & Strength Training

I spend a lot of time thinking about this topic. It’s how I make a living, after all. I recently was listening to an episode of Dave Tate’s Table Talk with Paul Carter, and Paul had a very nuanced take on fatigue. He talked specifically about the fatigue you experience from too much intensity (or load), vs too much volume (too many sets/reps, or maybe even just being in the gym too much more generally).

I recommend you listen to this if you want to understand the differences in the range of fatigue you may feel as a result from lifting and what to do about it. This discussion may be for the more intermediate to advanced lifter/athlete who has this type of connection with their own body and training. If that’s not you, that’s okay, it’s good to understand what these sorts of discussions look and sound like.

However, something that’s worked well for me as a rule of thumb is this: if a person’s big lifts (Squat, Bench, Deadlift) are under 300lbs for a 1RM (for men), then they probably don’t need a lot of deload based on that deep “central” or “neural” fatigue. You can push it fairly regularly and fairly hard. Maybe when they’re feeling a little burned out, back off for a week, but then get right back to it.

Note: The same applies for women, but I might taper the number down about 50lbs (except the bench press I put more around 200lbs and under).

On the other hand, regardless of the amount of load you can push in a squat, bench or deadlift, if your total training volume (essentially, sets and reps) continues to climb and get to really large numbers (on top of jiu jitsu, assuming you train jiu jitsu), then you probably do in fact need to plan your deloads regularly.

Deloading Jiu Jitsu

Overwhelming I consider the fatigue associated with jiu jitsu to be most akin to a “volume fatigue.” In other words, it’s cumulative load of minutes and hours (like sets and reps for instance), and not the “central” type of fatigue you get from pushing really heavy weight constantly. That doesn’t make it any less real or something you don’t need to deal with though.

Too much of this volume fatigue, just like in lifting, leads to excessive fatigue that doesn’t let you perform at your best.

Tapering Before a Competition

I think it’s really important to understand that if you begin training progressively harder 6-8 weeks out from a competition that a taper or deload is absolutely necessary to see the benefits of that increased effort. The attributes you build during the bulk of that 6-8 weeks can only show themselves if you are ready to go and not brutally beaten by your own fatigue.

I typically like to see athletes who run these types of “camps” to be really tired and damn near beat approximately 10 days out. The hardest of your training should have been done by 10 days out. At that point, you should begin to taper slowly and offload the fatigue so you can feel the benefits of all your hard work.

How you do that in those 10 days is up to you and how you feel, your experience, etc, but please understand that beating yourself up 4 days out only endangers your chances of winning competition day.

That said, I’ve noticed some trends with athletes I’ve worked with, but not necessarily enough to make a hard and fast rule. Some of these observations are:

• Generally, I notice the more someone wants to train in the days before a competition is usually responding to mental anxiety. This type of anxiety is more common in newer athletes or those with less competition experience.

• Funny enough, I think the athlete who manages their training really well throughout the year, and doesn’t particularly increase the intensity of their training in anticipation of a tournament probably doesn’t need to do much different at all. In other words, if you consistently train and aren’t increasing your training load prior to a tournament, you may not even have to taper at all. This probably describes many of you reading this, or rather, it should. This is, what I would say, the ideal range for a hobbyist/enthusiast to be in.

• More experienced athletes (the competitive/high level black belts), typically like to train up til 3-4 days before, and then either take off or really not do much besides basics drills, if that. Unlike the anxiety-induced training example I listed above, they typically are not worried that they’ll “forget” how to train in those 3 days or less that they take off.

As I said at the start of this article, deloading is a lot to cover. I hope this opens your eyes to some of the more simple solutions and paradoxically, complex considerations of deloading. If you’re confused, try to stick to the simple rules above and see if that doesn’t help you a bit.