As we begin Enduring Phase II on October 27th…we are offering a 40% discount to get you started today and through the month of November.
Use code: ENDURING2026 when signing up.
Key Takeaway
For our past few training cycles we have incorporated a “bodybuilding deload” about every 4-5 weeks during our programming.
This is a concept I borrowed from the phenomenal strength coach Christian Thibaudeau. The idea here is you spend a few weeks training like an “athlete” and then for a week or so move to a more traditional bodybuilding split. We do this for a few reasons:
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Impact- heavy compound lifts, jumps, throws, sprints, etc- are hard on the nervous system, joints, and tendons…you’ll need occasional breaks.
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Accommodation- this the phenomenon where if we train the same way and put the exact same stressors on the human body we will inevitably plateau, backtrack, and risk injury.
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Stress- Although certainly part of the concept of accommodation, I am referring to your overall life stressors. When we talking about our firefighters, cops, military- you all are uniquely challenged in your day to day career. These intermittent breaks can help reduce stress in the weight-room and let you deal with this thing called life.
1. Impact
To get in shape, make progress, get stronger, faster, more athletic, and even look good uniform- you need to put the body under stress. If you give yourself nothing to adapt to you will remain the same. Some of the best tools to do this are big compound lifts, jumps, throws, and hard conditioning. Problem is if you do this for too long you’ll start to overreach a bit. This will manifest itself as a bad workout at first or maybe your sessions feel harder than they should. This is normal, but what you do next is what matters. If you keep going this is when you start getting more aches and pains, usually from old injuries (if you’re in your late 20s or early 30s). Then this is where the tendonitis starts to develop, or a muscle strains, or worse case scenario a catastrophic injury.
During a bodybuilding deload week I’d keep your rep ranges higher, choose band and machine movements, or at least use a movement you were not using in your previous blocks.
The stimulus will be so different there is a high likelihood you’ll reduce inflammation, provide some blood flow to places you weren’t getting to when you were just doing heavy deadlifts, and again give those connective tissues a break. The idea here is to truly do the opposite.
One note I’ll make is when you return to your more athletic focused blocks, you might feel a bit “off” in the first week. Totally normal. First week ease back into those big lifts and in week 2 you might surprise yourself when you feel even stronger than when you did coming off the recovery week.
2. Accommodation
Again, accommodation is essentially providing the same stimulus for too long which ultimately leads to stagnation and injury. There are many ways to avoid this pitfall, but for this article I am just describing how we have used the bodybuilding deload in the first phase of Enduring in our live programming and how we will use it again in our second phase leading us into 2026.
By making this large change into a pure bodybuilding work, and even a body-part split, you’ll will certainly be providing a very different stimulus before returning back to your performance based training blocks. Again, this is just how we are avoiding accommodation for Phase 1 and 2 of Enduring. We accomplish this in other ways, in different blocks. Why do we do it differently every few months?
To avoid accommodation.
If we always use “bodybuilding deloads” you’ll get used to that change in stimulus as well. We program for the long term. You simply can’t keep doing the same thing for too long. Your body will get used to and you’ll lose your mind. I know I would.
3. Stress
For people in this line of work I don’t need to say much here. You know the job. Whether it’s seeing the worst society has to offer, or being burnt on during a training cycle in the military…you know sometimes you need some time way from hard training. Or at least you should this. Spending a week sculpting the guns and using mostly bands for a lot of training can do wonders for your results over the course of a training lifetime as opposed to what you think you need on a given day because you were convinced by your favorite influencer you have to feel like you killed yourself during every training session.
To be able to truly push yourself, like during some of the phenomenal challenge workouts you’ll find on the We Go Home Instagram, you’ll need to occasionally give yourself a break to recover.
Closing
This is just one way to give yourself a break between hard training blocks. As stated before we will do this using various different methods whether that is in our selection programming or our day to training.
You don’t always have to dedicate a full week to pure bodybuilding work, but this is just “a way” to give your body a break prior to heading back to the heavy lifts and hard conditioning.
You can also reduce intensity and volume (we use that method too) and often achieve a similar goal. However, I have found some people really like the bodybuilding work because it is so different and they enjoy a mental break from training the same way for a few weeks.
