Stress
How to Relieve Built-Up Fatigue and Sustain Your Good Habits
What elite athletes know about "deloading" that most habit-builders miss.
Posted May 11, 2025 Reviewed by Devon Frye
A paradox of good habits is that a break is sometimes exactly what's needed to sustain them. Elite sportspeople know this. We can borrow strategies from athletes to, like them, perform at a higher level in our personal and professional lives. Here, we'll borrow a concept from strength training called a "deload" and apply it to life in general.
What Is a Deload?
People who strength train are experts in managing the fatigue that accompanies the pursuit of high performance. Both in and out of athletics, many people mistakenly think that consistent progress comes from grinding without pause. But serious strength trainers know that isn't the case.
A deload is a brief period, typically one week, where weightlifters either significantly decrease the intensity and/or frequency of their training, or in some cases, pause it altogether. Deloads are used when fatigue has built up and becomes difficult to shake.
A heavy training load can feel sustainable for up to several months, but not indefinitely. Deloads help people sustain consistent training. They can be scheduled automatically (often after 4, 6, or 8 weeks) or taken as needed based on how the athlete feels.
Why Are Deloads Done?
There are three reasons for a deload. First, to reset physical fatigue. Second, to help prevent non-functioning overreaching, which is when you train hard but spin your wheels and don't progress. Third, for a mental reset.
Powerlifters and others who focus on strength training usually plan their training in blocks, and deloads can help them enter the next one feeling fresh. In other words, they restore and rejuvenate. These strategic steps back from intense workouts aren't signs of weakness but deliberate tools used by the most disciplined performers.
In this article, I'll show you how you can plan your own deloads.
Athletes Treat Fatigue as a Fact. Productivity Culture Treats It as a Flaw.
The personal productivity literature tends to emphasize unbroken chains of habits. Fatigue is mostly treated as a personal problem; if you're tired, something must be wrong with you. In strength training and athletic performance more broadly, managing fatigue is treated as a scientific question. It's widely accepted that people who train hard need periods to rest and recover.
Deloads reset both physical and mental fatigue. Other sports besides strength training use similar ideas, like when runners take a week off after a marathon to recover.
Which of Your Routines Result in Accumulated Fatigue?
Like strength training, positive routines in both your personal and professional life can still lead to accumulated fatigue that may need a periodic reset. You can take a one-week break from any routine to refresh and counteract built-up fatigue.
Examples include:
- A week off cooking
- A week off driving (including errands, after-school/work activities, in-person grocery shopping)
- A week off from a daily habit (e.g., if you're trying to improve your painting skills by painting every day, or your second-language skills by practicing every day)
Active Recovery During Deloads is Encouraged
When people take deloads from strength training, they don't stop moving altogether. Many lifters continue to go to the gym but greatly reduce the number of sessions, how much weight they lift, or the number of reps they complete. Complementary activities like walking and gentle movements such as yoga are often encouraged as well.
You can apply the same principle to any area you're deloading from. For example, if you're deloading from cooking, you might rely on easy but still healthy meals like bagged salads to maintain your nutrition without the effort of cooking.
Beyond Rest: The Additional Benefits of Deloads
Deloads give you a chance to refresh and reset. They also create space in your life to try out new things.
While you could use your deload week to dive into another absorbing activity (like taking a deload week from the gym to focus more on studying for finals), that's not the main goal. The space that deloads create, where you're not absorbed in one specific activity, allows you to dabble.
If you're not spending, say, 75 minutes a day working out at the gym and 20 minutes driving there and back, you might use that time to bake, read more stories to your children, do yoga, take on a household task your spouse usually handles, or finally read the birding book your brother gave you two Christmases ago to identify the birds in your garden.
Rather than forcing a specific outcome, approach your deload with openness to what naturally emerges. Be curious about what you feel like doing when you're not as fatigued from the activity you're deloading from.
5 Questions to Plan Your Deload
These questions are based on an exercise-related deload, but you can adapt them for whatever you're deloading from.
- Will you schedule your deload (e.g., every X weeks) or take it based on need? If based on need, what criteria will you use? Examples: Fatigue reaching 8/10 on most days; no progress in training for two weeks; or patterns like being too tired to bathe your kids and passing that off to your spouse.
- How long will you deload?
- What else will you do during your deload? Resist the urge to add another absorbing activity. Anything you plan to do should feel like active rest.
- What will you refrain from to get the full benefits of the deload?
- How will you ease back into your normal routine after your deload? We've all heard of the person who trains for months to run a marathon, completes it, then doesn't run again for five years. To avoid that, plan how you'll resume your habit, like having a new training block ready to start.
Deloads Help Sustain Our Good Habits
Deloads aren’t just for athletes. There are many routines in our personal and professional lives that create accumulated fatigue. Being diligent in sticking to our good habits can put us in a similar position to the athlete. We can cope with the sustained load—the “grind”—for a while, but we will reach a point when our performance plateaus, or we’re not quite recovering each day.
When you reach this point, a deload is your friend. It’s a tool you can use to strategically refresh. It can help you maintain your habit while meeting your other responsibilities and overcoming stalls in your progress. Sometimes a break in a routine is exactly what you need to sustain it.
To learn more counterintuitive strategies for reducing fatigue, read this guide.
