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To build muscle, you need a ‘de-load’ week. Here’s how a powerlifting doctor strategizes rest for maximum gains.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

Working hard in the gym without seeing results?

A short rest may help you break that plateau, according to a doctor who set state and national records in powerlifting.

Dr. Shernan Holtan, a hematologist and busy mom of two, has been lifting weights for over a decade. She hits the gym at 5:30 a.m. for an hour of training before heading to her day job as chief of blood and marrow transplant at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Her key to avoiding physical burnout and keeping up gains: Every four to six weeks, she eases up on her training to let her body recover and build back stronger.

“You give yourself a break. Come back, lower the weight drastically for a week, and really just let your body soak up all of the stress that you just put it through to let it repair and heal,” she told Business Insider.

The strategic break is commonly referred to in the fitness world as a “de-load week.” It’s an evidence-backed way to smash through plateaus, reduce the risk of injury, and boost muscle and strength gains for everyone from elite powerlifters and bodybuilders to everyday athletes.


Dr. Shernan Holtan performing weighted lunges in the gym

Building weights is about challenging your muscles, then resting and recovering.

Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center



For Holtan, deloads have enabled her to maintain steady progress for years, gradually building up the strength to squat 225 pounds (or more) for reps. In that time, she’s also started running and CrossFit, in addition to hiking, biking, and going to the gym (sometimes with her teenage daughter).

“I exercise every day, but I’m not doing crazy stuff every day,” she said.

Here’s how to know if you should take a deload, and the right way to rest for better fitness.

Why resting helps you build more muscle

Unless you’re a pro athlete, less can be more when it comes to exercise.

That’s because muscle and strength gains only happen during the rest periods between gym sessions. A good gym session can break down muscle fibers, prompting them to grow back stronger, but only if you provide them with the time and resources (energy in the form of sufficient calories and protein) to recover.

Holtan said to think of it as a slow and steady effort over time, rather than going all-out at the gym (and being too sore to come back).

“It’s little micro adjustments, tiny increases in weight, a few extra reps,” she said.

Then, over the weeks and months of training, a de-load can help your body to reset and keep making progress.

A de-load can also be a full rest from exercise, and can be a good idea during a vacation or holiday, so you can fully enjoy the time off.

When to take a de-load

The right time to take a rest can vary depending on your training and goals. Trainers typically recommend taking a break every four to 12 weeks.

The length of the rest can vary too.

If you’re consistently in the gym three times a week, you may only need a day or two to deload, and can go two or three months between breaks. Competitive athletes who train five or more days a week might benefit from longer breaks every month or two.

Holtan focuses on a specific goal for four to six weeks, then rests and repeats with a slightly different goal.


Dr Shernan Holtan lifting weights in the gym performing an overhead barbell press

Dr. Holtan said her training schedule prioritizes a specific rep range for four to six weeks, then she takes a break to recover.

Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center



For instance, she might spend a month or so building up to a heavy one-rep max deadlift, bench press, and squat. After her deload week, she might focus on lifting moderate weight for more reps.

This is a type of training cycle known as periodization, which can help prevent athletes from overtraining or getting stuck in a rut.

Listening to your body can also signal that a rest might be beneficial.

If you’re just not enjoying the gym, struggle to finish a workout ,or need to foam roll the pain away, an extra rest day might be just what you need.




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Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says AI scaling ‘must be pushed to the maximum’

by with No Comment Xpandfy

There’s a debate rippling through Silicon Valley: How far can scaling laws take the technology?

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, whose company just released Gemini 3 to widespread acclaim, has made it clear where he stands on the issue.

“The scaling of the current systems, we must push that to the maximum, because at the minimum, it will be a key component of the final AGI system,” he said at the Axios’ AI+ Summit in San Francisco last week. “It could be the entirety of the AGI system.”

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a still theoretical version of AI that reasons as well as humans. It’s the goal all the leading AI companies are competing to reach, fueling huge amounts of spending on infrastructure and talent.

AI scaling laws suggest that the more data and compute an AI model is given, the smarter it will get.

Hassabis said that scaling alone will likely get the industry to AGI, but that he suspects there will need to be”one or two” other breakthroughs as well.

The problem with scaling alone is that there is a limit to publicly available data, and adding compute means building data centers, which is expensive and taxing on the environment.

Some AI watchers are also concerned that the AI companies behind the leading large-language models are beginning to show diminishing returns on their massive investments in scaling.

Researchers like Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Meta who recently announced he was leaving to run his own startup, believe the industry needs to consider another way.

“Most interesting problems scale extremely badly,” he said at the National University of Singapore in April. “You cannot just assume that more data and more compute means smarter AI.”

LeCun is leaving Meta to work on building world models, an alternative to large-language models that rely on collecting spatial data rather than language-based data.

“The goal of the startup is to bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences,” he wrote on LinkedIn in November.




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