RECOMMENDATIONS FOR TIME OFF
I want to go over my recommended strategies to follow during time off from training. A lot of people get these ideas to do cross training or go for runs or still lift once a week or play basketball a lot. My response to that is, "What happened to taking time off?" I don't want to patronize anyone but I have to say this: If you need to rest, REST!! I'm a firm believer in not working out at all for three or four weeks following a few months of hard training. Eliminating all physical stress on the body has great benefits. I do have one exception. Time off from training may be when athletic gains show up. You don't want to miss out on that. I recommend a short athletic session to test out whatever ability you want to improve. That could mean playing your sport, testing your vertical or 40-yard dash, throwing down some dunks, or whatever. It should be a relatively short session done once per week or even less. Now, if you have no reason to think you'll be seeing athletic gains during your time off, feel free to not even do the one session per week. You'll get more complete neural recovery without it. I also need to point out that I do not consider stretching to be a workout. It puts almost no stress on the body and thus does not need to be avoided for recovery. If you need to increase your flexibility, a period of rest is a great time to commit to stretching a lot and making large improvements. If you just want to maintain flexibility, stretching two or three times a week is fine. Apart from an occasional athletic session and stretching, I encourage people to actually be inactive during time off from training. Note, these recommendations are for rest periods of six weeks or less. If you're taking off for longer than that or if you don't even have plans to pick up training again, you should pick up your activity level after the first three or four weeks of rest to prevent serious loss of strength and fitness.

I know my recommendations surprise a lot of people, so I'll do my best to justify them. First, the athletic performance qualities are not as fragile as people tend to think. Flexibility is easily maintained. Springiness is an elusive quality, but when you have it, it will stick around if you don't overuse it. That's where the one athletic session per week comes from. Explosiveness actually goes up during time off. (I'll talk about that in a minute.) Strength is really the only thing you have to worry about losing, and it's not as big of a problem as people think. Resting for longer than a week will almost certainly cause a loss of strength; it may even be significant. But regaining strength is usually easy, far easier than gaining it originally. The loss of strength during rest is primarily due to the deactivation of motor units. (groups of muscle fibers and the nerve that controls them) Those motor units can be reactivated quickly when strength training begins again. As a result, strength levels from before the rest period are usually regained within a short time. Planned, strategic time off need not have much negative affect on the athletic performance qualities.

Now consider the benefits of time off. Training hard wears out the body. Recovery is not just a short term process. Most people understand that you need a day or two off after a hard workout. But people are less aware of the need for a whole week off after several weeks of training or a whole month off after several months of training. Over time, the body just becomes less willing to adapt to stress, even with rest between workouts and variety in the training plan. This is not very well explained; it just happens. A period without physical stress allows the body to refresh itself. When training begins again, the body is once again capable of responding well. If you stop your regular training but introduce some new stress like cross training or conditioning or whatever, you interfere with the restoration of your body. Thus, my recommendation is to rest as completely as you can.

My other big reason for trying to be inactive during time off is one of my favorite topics in all of sports training. It's called the Overshoot Phenomenon. This will take some explaining. First let me clarify that when I use the word explosiveness, I mean the speed at which muscle tension is generated, also known as rate of force development (RFD). A key factor that determines explosiveness is the twitch speed of muscle fibers. People have created three labels (type 1, type 2A, type 2B) for classifying muscle fibers, but in actuality there is a whole twitch speed spectrum of far more than three types of fibers. Every person has fibers in all areas of the spectrum. People with a higher percentage of fast-twitch fibers have an advantage when performing athletic movements. It has been discovered that muscle fibers actually shift up or down on the twitch speed spectrum in response to one's activities. However, no one has really figured out how this happens. A muscle fiber's type is identified by the chemical composition of myosin protein within the muscle cells, but at the same time, a slow-twitch fiber hooked up to a nerve from a fast-twitch motor unit will behave more like a fast-twitch fiber. So it's hard to say what controls a fiber's twitch-speed or how it can change, but the point is that it does happen. Here's the surprising part. Sedentary people have an extremely high percentage of fast-twitch muscle fibers, an even higher percentage than highly trained athletes. You're probably wondering how this is possible. The explanation is that fast-twitch fibers use a ton of energy while slow-twitch fibers are very energy efficient. A sedentary person does not need to conserve energy for any activity, so the body has no need for energy efficient muscle fibers. Thus, your lazy couch potato friend has a higher percentage of fast-twitch fibers than you. Unfair, right? It gets worse. When a person begins performing strength training or explosive exercises, muscle fibers actually shift down toward the slow end of the spectrum. There are other factors that affect explosiveness, but in this area, explosive training actually makes you less explosive. Pretty bogus, right? Here's the payoff, though. During a period of rest following a period of explosive training, muscle fibers will shift back toward the fast end of the spectrum and actually surpass, or overshoot, their speed from before the training. So you end up with a higher percentage of fast-twitch fibers than you started with. No one has been able to explain why this happens. That is the Overshoot Phenomenon. It's a critical component of increasing explosiveness, and you have to be inactive to take advantage of it. That's my final reason for encouraging people to avoid training for a few weeks in a row.

The Overshoot Phenomenon is not a new or secret discovery; it's taught in undergraduate sports training classes. Yet people never seem to talk about it or take advantage of it in training. I don't know if they just can't handle taking time off or if they don't believe it works or what. Let me assure you that the Overshoot Phenomenon is proven. It's called a phenomenon because it's unexplained, not because it's unreliable. It's confirmed by research, it shows up in stories from sports history, and I've personally experienced it multiple times. It's never failed me. The result is my ability to hang power snatch around 60% of my max squat. This is an extremely valuable tool to be used in training.