Curious is people on her who both ride and lift also de-load their lifts (squats, deadlifts, etc) on a recovery week in TrainerRoad. I have been wondering if my legs are actually getting proper recovery if I am still trying to squat heavy? Or if since they pull on different energy systems does it matter?
If you do de-load do you decrease volume, intensity or both?
Curious to hear peoples thoughts?
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This is a lot like thinking about bike stress vs life stress. They’re different, but getting a lot of one probably impacts your ability to cope with the other.
The signalling pathways are different, but you should consider the accumulated and acute muscular fatigue and neural fatigue.
Most people recommend, therefore, to sync the deload weeks together.
However, I was recently following a coached strength plan that was one week out of sync with my TR plan. So I got a strength deload during my peak endurance week and then my first load during my endurance rest.
I quite liked it - took the edge off the hard 3rd week of endurance and I felt really fresh for my first strength re-load. But that doesn’t mean it was optimal. Perhaps I was carrying too much average fatigue through both.
Anyway, experiment over as Christmas has flipped the cycles around…
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I don’t understand…a deload week is a deload week all z1 don’t lift heavy if you are taking it seriously otherwise go for some prs that will help the deload for sure 
On your coached strength plan, did your de-load reduce sets and reps as well as weight?
I would definitely try to line up deload in the Gym with deload on the bike. Having those full resets are good. Sure, they pull on different ‘systems’ but it’s still the same legs and the same muscles. They deplete the same glycogen and use the same neural drive. If you aren’t training to your recovery capacity in either the gym or on the bike then you can get away with not doing the full recovery week but I still don’t think it’s optimal.
FWIW, I usually cut volume and intensity in the gym during deload weeks. I work up to the first weight that feels like it’s giving me any kind of resistance and then do a set or two of that and move one. So my max deadlift is like 340lb-ish and my deload deadlifts are in the neighborhood of 195 or so.
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I deload all the things bike and gym.
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Thanks to everyone for replies. I will de-load both lifting and cycling together. Seems like cutting volume and intensity is the recommendation.
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