What is a deload week?

A short period of reduced training stress, planned to ease physical and mental fatigue and prepare you for the training that follows. That is the definition a 2023 consensus of expert strength coaches agreed on. In practice a deload usually lasts about a week.

How often should sprinters deload?

Every four to six weeks is a common rhythm, and the week before a test or race is a natural place for one. In a survey of 246 strength and physique athletes, deloads came every 5.6 weeks on average and lasted about 6 days.

Should I stop sprinting during a deload week?

No. Keep a few sprints at full speed and cut the number of reps. Taper research found the best results when volume dropped and intensity stayed the same, and a study that stopped lifting entirely for a week found smaller strength gains than continuing.

Is a deload the same as a taper?

They work the same way, by cutting volume to let fatigue fall. A taper comes before an important competition and often runs about two weeks, while a deload is a lighter week inside a training block.

Deload weeks for sprinters: how often, and what to cut

By the Sprint University coaching team

A deload week is a planned week of lighter training that lets accumulated fatigue clear so your fitness can show. For sprinters, cut the number of reps and sets by roughly 40–60% and keep every sprint at full speed with full rest. A common rhythm is one every four to six weeks, or the week before a test or race.

The volume cut and the decision to keep intensity both come from taper research, which has studied this question far more than deloads have.

Why does fatigue hide your fitness?

Every hard session leaves you with two things: a bit more fitness and a bit more fatigue. The fitness-fatigue model, introduced by Banister and Calvert, treats your performance on any day as fitness minus fatigue, each with its own weighting. Both build up as you train, but fatigue fades much faster. When researchers fitted the model to endurance athletes, the time constants came out around 35–51 days for fitness and 8–13 days for fatigue.

A lighter week exploits that gap. Fatigue drops away within days while most of the fitness stays, and the model predicts you come out of it faster than you went in. The model's authors describe the ideal taper as one that loses as little fitness and as much fatigue as possible.

Full sprint recovery takes days. In one study, athletes who ran 15 × 30m at maximal effort needed up to 72 hours for the fatigue to fully resolve. Stack three sprint days, two lifting sessions and plyos into a week and repeat it for three weeks, and the leftover fatigue starts to cover up the progress you made.

A joint consensus statement on overtraining calls a short, planned dip in performance followed by improvement after recovery "functional overreaching." If you keep piling on load without the recovery, it can slide into non-functional overreaching, where performance stays down and the improvement doesn't come.

How often should you deload?

We couldn't find a study of deload frequency in sprinters, so the best data come from strength sports. In a survey of 246 competitive strength and physique athletes, deloads lasted 6.4 days on average and came every 5.6 weeks, with a spread of a little over two weeks either way. The athletes planned them in advance, sometimes combined with deloading early when performance stalled or soreness and joint aches built up.

A training block makes the choice for you. Sprint University's 6-week base program builds to its biggest week in week 3, sharpens into a filmed retest in week 4 and tapers in week 6 before the final test. The speed training guide lays out each week's job.

Plan the deload ahead of time and move it earlier if the signs pile up: sprint times sliding for a week, jumps down, poor sleep, soreness that won't clear. The recovery readiness guide covers how to read each of those.

What do you cut in a deload week?

Cut volume and keep intensity. A meta-analysis of 27 taper studies in competitive athletes found the best results with a two-week taper that reduced training volume by 41–60%, with intensity and frequency left alone. An earlier review advised keeping intensity, cutting volume by up to 60–90% and reducing the number of sessions by no more than 20%, and found performance usually improved by about 3%.

Some sprint coaches cut less. A review of elite sprint training reports that coach Stephen Francis drops volume by about 30% over the last 10 days before a major meet. The same review expects sprinters to gain less from a taper than the 2–3% often given as a realistic goal.

In practice, for a sprinter:

Run fewer sprints at the same effort and rest. A 100% rep with full recovery keeps your speed sharp at a low fatigue cost.
Keep your usual training days, and turn an optional day into rest. Mujika and Padilla's guideline of cutting frequency by no more than 20% fits a six-day week losing one session.
Lift the same weights for fewer sets. In a 9-week study, lifters who stopped training entirely for a week in the middle gained less strength than those who kept going, with no difference in muscle size or power.
Drop the sled, the longest reps and any new exercises for the week.

The Sprint University app

A lighter day when your body asks for one

Sprint University reads your HRV, resting heart rate and sleep from Apple Health each morning, plus a short check-in. On a low-readiness day it keeps the session but trims multi-set blocks to about 70% of their sets, at the same intensity.

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A sample deload week for sprinters

This week takes week 1 of Sprint University's base program and cuts the sprint and jump volume roughly in half. Effort and rest stay where they were.

Day	Usual week	Deload week
Day 1	Acceleration: 4 × 20m, 2 × 30m, 1 × 40m, 4 × 10m sled	2 × 20m, 2 × 30m @ 100%, rest 4–5 min
Day 2	Jumps + throws: 6 × 3 broad jumps, 3 × 6 med ball throws	3 × 3 broad jumps, 2 × 6 med ball throws
Day 3	Sprint-float-sprint: 4 reps @ 95%, rest 4 min	2 reps @ 95%, rest 4 min
Day 4	Optional tempo: 8 × 120m @ 70%	Rest, or 4 × 120m @ 70%
Day 5	Flying 20s: 4 reps @ 100%, rest 5 min	2 reps @ 100%, rest 5 min
Day 6	Optional active recovery	Rest

Every day keeps the full 15-minute warm-up. If you lift, keep the weights you used the week before and do about half the sets. Day 1 is the program's own taper session from week 6, which drops to four sprints with 4–5 minutes of rest:

Week 6, day 1 · Acceleration

Sharp Accelerations (taper)

High day

Block	Prescription
Track warm-up	15 min: easy jog, dynamic drills, build-ups
20m sprints	2 × 20m @ 100%, rest 4 min
30m sprints	2 × 30m @ 100%, rest 5 min
Barefoot cooldown walk	One easy lap of the track barefoot, unhurried

Come out of the deload into a normal training week or a test. For timing a test, see the 100m time-trial protocol in the sprint warm-up guide, and compare your result on the how good is my time pages.

Common mistakes

Taking the whole week off: In one study, a week off lifting cost strength compared with training through it. Keep a few fast reps and your usual lifts in, at lower volume.
Cutting the speed instead of the reps: Running everything at 80% feels easier but leaves your legs out of practice at top speed. Run fewer reps, all of them fast.
Filling the spare time with extra work: A new conditioning circuit or a hard pickup game puts the fatigue straight back. Rest on the days you dropped.
Deloading on a fixed date while you feel terrible: If your times have slid for a week and you're sleeping badly, move the deload forward instead of grinding out the plan.