reckonerEverybody agrees you should back off occasionally. Almost nobody agrees on when, or on what backing off means, and the two commonest answers are both bad ones: take a week off, or take ten per cent off the bar.
A week off costs you the position and the practice as well as the fatigue. Ten per cent off the bar costs you the load, which is 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 reason is worth being blunt about. Fatigue comes overwhelmingly from volume, and strength lives in the load and the practice. Cut the thing that causes the fatigue and keep the things that do not, and there is nothing to climb back up the following week.
Take the volume. Leave the bar alone.
The scheduled one
Every block is four weeks: three 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 repsRPE 7.5 with room left in the range, so reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 4 x 7 at 60 kg | More reps 7 → 8 repsRPE 7.5 with room left in the range, so reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 4 x 8 at 60 kg | Deload 40% of sets offThree 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. |
| 4 | 2 x 8 at 60 kg | More reps 8 → 9 repsRPE 7.5 with room left in the range, so reps climb before the load does. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four sets. |
| 5 | 4 x 9 at 60 kg | More reps 9 → 10 repsRPE 7.5 with room left in the range, so reps climb before the load does. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running reckoner/engine.py when this page was generated.
Week three is the lighter one and week four is straight back to full sets. Nothing was lost: the reps pick up from where they were.
The earned one
The other kind arrives when you have asked for it. If a muscle group averages more than one point over your target effort for two trained weeks in a row, Reckoner backs that group off now rather than waiting for the block to come round to it.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 x 10 at 60 kg | Holding steady 60 kgThe last set came in at RPE 9.5, which is 1.5 over target. Grinding is a recovery signal, so nothing is added. |
| 2 | 4 x 10 at 60 kg | Backed off 40% of sets offYou have been over target on chest for two trained weeks, so Reckoner backs off now rather than waiting for the block to do it. 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. |
| 3 | 2 x 10 at 60 kg | Load up 60 kg → 62.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7.5, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 62.5 kg and reps reset to six. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running reckoner/engine.py 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. An earned back-off takes the block's slot, so a group cannot have 40 per cent of its sets removed twice in a fortnight and end up doing almost nothing.
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.