What is a deload week?

A deload week is a planned period of reduced training intensity or volume, typically lasting about a week, to let your body and nervous system recover from accumulated fatigue.

Here’s what it means in practice:

Aspect	Explanation
Purpose	To prevent overtraining, reduce injury risk, and allow muscles, joints, and your nervous system to fully recover so you can keep progressing long term.
How It’s Done	You keep the same exercises but lower the weight (usually 40–60% of your normal load), reduce the number of sets or reps, or take more rest days that week.
When to Do It	Every 4–8 weeks of consistent hard training, or anytime you feel unusually sore, fatigued, or notice your performance dropping.
Benefits	Improves recovery, restores motivation, helps avoid plateaus, and can actually lead to better strength and muscle gains once normal training resumes.
For Beginners vs. Advanced Lifters	Beginners often don’t need frequent deloads since their overall training load is lower. Experienced lifters benefit more because they accumulate more fatigue from heavier, higher-volume training.

In short:
A deload week is like a strategic “reset”. You’re still training, just lighter, so your body can come back stronger.

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How to Approach a Deload Week in the Built With Science+ App

While the Built With Science+ app doesn’t currently include a dedicated “pause” or “deload” mode, you can still manage a deload week effectively within your existing program.

Here’s how:

• It’s perfectly fine to skip or lighten workouts during your deload period. As long as you continue to stay consistent with your weigh-ins and nutrition logging, you’ll remain on track toward your long-term goals.

• If you’d like your deload week to appear clearly in your workout history, you can remove your workout days completely from that week or set a note within one of your exercises that it was a lighter workout day. This way, when you look back on these days later, you’ll see that it was an intentional rest or deload week, not a missed one.