reckoner
Everybody agrees you should back off occasionally. Almost nobody agrees on when, or on what backing off means. Asked what they actually do, strength and physique athletes overwhelmingly take sets off, and most of them take the load off too: about four in five reduce the weight on their main lifts, and about the same share reduce the effort1.
Reckoner takes the sets and leaves the bar alone, which puts it in the minority. This is the reasoning, and you are entitled to disagree with it: a week off costs you the position and the practice as well as the fatigue, and taking the load off costs you the thing you spent two months earning and the one thing that was not tired.
What comes off is the volume
Reckoner takes about 40 per cent of the sets off and leaves everything else alone. The load holds. The reps hold. You do the same lift at the same weight for the same reps, fewer times, and you walk out of the gym feeling like you have been robbed, which is exactly what a deload is supposed to feel like.
The shape of it is not unusual outside the weights room. The taper literature, which is mostly endurance athletes rather than lifters, keeps landing on the same answer: cut the volume by roughly half and change neither the intensity nor how often you turn up2. The bet Reckoner makes is that the same trade holds under a bar: fatigue is bought mostly with volume, and the load is what holds the skill in place. That is a position rather than a finding, and it is the one this software is built on.
Take the volume. Leave the bar alone.
The scheduled one
Every block is six weeks: five that build and one that backs off. It counts weeks you actually trained rather than weeks on the calendar, so a fortnight away for work does not spend your lighter week while you are not there.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 x 6 at 60 kg | More reps 6 → 7 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 4 x 7 at 60 kg | More reps 7 → 8 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 4 x 8 at 60 kg | More reps 8 → 9 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 4 x 9 at 60 kg | More reps 9 → 10 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 4 x 10 at 60 kg | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 10 at 60 kg | Load up 60 kg → 62.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 62.5 kg. The weight went up, so the reps come down to eight. You are now working 6 to 10. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four sets. |
| 7 | 4 x 8 at 62.5 kg | More reps 8 → 9 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
Week six is the lighter one, and the block that follows opens back at full sets. Nothing was lost: the lighter week is logged at the load and the reps you earned, and it progresses off them like any other week. In the run above it is the week that earns the first step on the bar.
The earned one
The other kind arrives when you have asked for it. If one lift runs over what that class of lift is asked for, two trained weeks running, Reckoner backs that lift off for one week rather than waiting for the block to come round to it. Only that lift: everything else in the week carries on building, because nothing else told us anything was wrong. One week, and then it resumes, and the muscle group it sits in needs two trained weeks back on the bar before another lift in it can earn one.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 x 10 at 60 kg | Load up 60 kg → 62.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 9, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 62.5 kg. The weight went up, so the reps come down to eight. You are now working 6 to 10. You finished every set that was asked for, which is what earns it. |
| 2 | 4 x 8 at 62.5 kg | Backed off 4 → 2 setsThis lift has been over what it is asked for two trained weeks running, so Reckoner takes about 40% of its sets off for one week rather than waiting for the block to do it. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. Nothing else in your week moves. You have also been over what this lift is asked for two trained weeks running, so the rest between sets goes up from 150 seconds to 210 seconds. Nothing else about the lift moves. |
| 3 | 2 x 8 at 62.5 kg | More reps 8 → 9 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
It does not wait for a missed rep, because a missed rep is the confirmation rather than the warning. One rough session is noise. Two in a row is a pattern, and the plan changes.
The two never stack, because they never reach the same lift in the same week. A lift that is running hot gets backed off on its own, one lane at a time, and the block's scheduled lighter week still lands exactly when the block says it will, whatever any one lift has been doing lately. Neither lever waits for the other and neither stands in for it.
What you should do in a deload week
Do the sets that are there
All of them, at the prescribed weight and reps. The temptation is to add a couple back because it feels too easy. That is the week not working.
Keep the quality up
Same depth, same tempo, same set-up. This is the best week of the month to fix something in your technique, because nothing is hard enough to hide behind.
Log it like any other week
The engine reads a deload week the same way it reads any other, and the following week is built from what you did in it.