I’m not against deload week as it does work for me but why do we need it ?
Are good sleep, eating habits and normal recuperation time not enough to fully recover ?
In: Biology
No, good sleep and eating are typically mostly enough. Most people, though, don’t get enough sleep. A deload week allows muscles to *fully* recover.
Some people may need it, others may not. It’s all about how much you push yourself, and what kinds of wear and tear you apply to your body.
It’s not a simple “you have X units of workout-ness available to you and you regain Y units for every night of rest.” Some kinds of wear and tear don’t get fixed overnight, or even over two days. Some tissues grow slowly. Some nutrients come in only small amounts. Some inflammation stacks upon itself, due to lingering hormone levels or the like.
Taking a week pseudo-“break,” where you do only the minimum necessary to keep your metabolism in active, ensures that most of those things get taken care of. Inflammation compounds in the blood have a half-life as the body makes use of them; 24 hours may not be enough to flush all of them out, but 168 hours probably will be. E.g. if it has a half life of 6 hours (so you get rid of 93.75% each day), you may build up a steady state of about 6.7% above your fresh, just-worked-out baseline, and that persistent extra bit can cause effects over time. Take a whole week where you only do (say) 10% of your usual load, and now you have reduced that persistent excess from 6.7% down to 0.067%, 100 times smaller, likely barely even noticeable against the background of other sources of inflammation.
This applies to all sorts of things, and the slower your body deals with this stuff, the more beneficial it is to take a deload week once in a while.
Unless you’ve been training for 2+ years and are at the point you could compete regionally it’s very unlikely you need them.
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