Deloading
By Chris Gorden
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| Many wrestling programs employ varying approaches regarding their in-season and off-season conditioning; some strength train in-season while others shut down the weight room to avoid potential overuse injuries. From my experience, deloading throughout the off-season and maintaining a, low rep-low weight, approach during in-season training has aided our wrestlers in maintaining strength gains without excessive muscle hypertrophy, especially for those actively cutting weight. It becomes increasingly difficult to recover from wrestling sessions and heavy weight training with minimal caloric intake and can often lead to injury, difficulty with weight management, extreme fatigue and more |
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| In strength training, deloading is the intentional reduction of training intensity and load weight to promote recovery. The theory behind deloading is that it helps prevent training injuries by periodically giving athletes’ joints, tendons, and ligaments a break. As the post season nears many of our athletes are pretty beat up and greatly benefit from active recovery and mobility work; I prefer adding banded and small plate mobility work as auxiliary lifts. |
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There are four progressive stages of stress on the body beginning with the general adaptation syndrome (GAS). When the body faces a stressor (training load) of any kind, the athlete will experience a small drop in performance. This is then followed by the alarm reaction, the initial reaction to a stressor, or the point where the body is forced to adapt to the stress by increasing blood and oxygen flow to the muscles. Resistance development by the body increases its functional capacity to deal with a stressor and this adaptation therefore increases the ability to recruit muscle fibers to overcome the stressor. The final stage of stress, exhaustion, where most overuse injuries occur, is caused by prolonged or intolerable amounts of stress placed on the body leading to injuries such as muscle strains, joint pain, stress fractures, etc. |
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Injuries resulting from exhaustion are prevalent during Folk Style season, so it is very important to be judicious with the programming where in most cases with in-season strength training, less is more. I typically have my athletes decrease their training load along with decreased reps or difficulty of the movement. There are several different ways to set up your deload program: traditional, physique, progressive and auto regulated are among the most popular. Below are examples of an autoregulated and a deloading program with a mobility focus that may benefit your wrestlers. |
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Traditional Deload |
