Professional athletes and keen amateurs will be familiar with the idea of deload week – a planned block of lower intensity training to support recovery and overall improvement. When you look at how hard they train every other week, you’d think it would be a relief, like a cheat meal or a well deserved luxury.
But deload week is surprisingly unpopular. It feels like slacking off or, worse, that the recent gains might be lost. For many it’s a learned discipline to follow the programme rather than sneaking in extra training when the coach isn’t looking.
People in the helping professions and carer roles are often the same. It’s easier to go full intensity, past the point of risking burnout, than to build in ways to sustain our energy for the long haul. By the time we get to holidays, we’re usually long so overdue for rest that we spend most of the time recovering. And weekends, lunch breaks and sick days aren’t enough to do more than catch our breath or hit a brief pause.
Yet taking time for intentional periods of reduced effort can enhance our overall performance, often in surprising ways. It’s not just a week to prioritise sleep and consciously aiming for ‘good enough’ rather than all-out effort. These weeks can foster creative thinking, integrate prior learning and reclaim joy, not just for you but for the people around you.
Like with athletes, it takes time, experimentation and learning to sit with the initial discomfort of feeling like we’re not doing enough. It might take trial and error to find the best version for our lives right now. We might start small with just a few hours or a day, and then build up. We can schedule it into our diary, listen to our body, vary intensity or deliberately book in more enjoyable parts of our work for that week. However we do it, the real benefit comes when we learn to deload before we desperately need it.
Helen Mentha 