If you were to think about the key to getting fit, you’d probably imagine you need to spend plenty of time in the gym. But many fitness influencers claim that taking time away from the gym every six to eight weeks – known as a “deload week” – is actually the key to improving fitness gains.

Deload weeks mostly involve toning down the intensity of your workouts. These are typically done during periods of heavy training. The express aim of a deload week is to give the body time to recover from the fatigue and damage that can be caused by periods of intense training.

Intense training or high volumes of training cause us to accumulate damage in our muscle tissues. While this damage is an essential part of the process in improving fitness gains, these improvements can only happen if the body has time to recover.

During exercise, muscles can develop tiny tears and their fibres can become disorganised after intense training. This causes an inflammatory response in muscle tissues which requires time in an “unloaded state” (resting or doing low-intensity exercise) to resolve. This inflammation is actually important for promoting positive changes in our muscles – leading to improvements in fitness.

But if........

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