Deloading Practices in Strength and Physique Sports: A Cross-sectional Survey

BACKGROUND

This study explored the deloading practices of competitive strength and physique athletes. A 55-item anonymised web-based survey was distributed to a convenience-based, cross-sectional sample of competitive strength and physique athletes (n = 246; males = 181 [73.6%], females = 65 [26.4%]; age = 29.5 ± 8.6 years) who had 8.2 ± 6.2 years of resistance training and 3.8 ± 3.1 years of competition experience.

RESULTS

All athletes deloaded within training with energy and fatigue management being the main reasons to do so. The typical duration of a deload was 6.4 ± 1.7 days, integrated into the training programme every 5.6 ± 2.3 weeks. Deloading was undertaken using a proactive, pre-planned strategy (or in combination with an autoregulated approach) and undertaken when performance stalled or during periods of increased muscle soreness or joint aches. Athletes reported that training volume would decrease (through a reduction in both repetitions per set and sets per week), but training frequency would remain unchanged during deloads. Additionally, athletes reported that training intensity (load lifted) would decrease, and effort would be reduced (facilitated through an increase in repetitions in reserve). Athletes would generally maintain the same exercise selection during deloading. For athletes that supplemented deloading with additional recovery modalities (n = 118; 48%), the most reported strategies were massage, static stretching and foam rolling.

CONCLUSION

Results from this research might assist strength and physique athletes and coaches to plan their deloading. Future research should empirically investigate the findings from this study to further evaluate the potential utility of deloading in strength and physique sports.

An improved nonlinear deloading approach based on the fuzzy controller for wind turbine generators in an islanded microgrid

The wind turbine generators (WTG's) incapability of primary frequency support during system contingencies due to its decoupled nature from the system frequency causes profound integration and stability issues. The present study focuses on resolving such issues by enabling the WTGs to participate in long-term frequency support under the derated operation of WTGs. The deloading operation of WTGs can provide a specific reserve power margin by reducing its rotor speed, which can be utilized during system contingencies. In literature, linear and quadratic deloading techniques have been proposed but these fail to replicate the nonlinear characteristics of the WTG accurately, thereby making deloading ineffective. To effectively implement the deloading, this work uses a more-accurate higher-order Newton's interpolation polynomial (HNIP), to cope with the highly nonlinear characteristics of WTG. The proposed deloading approach is also augmented with a fuzzy-based intelligent supplementary control structure to handle the inherent and incorporated nonlinearities in WTG. The microgrid system, consisting of a conventional energy source with WTG, has been considered as system under investigation. The integral time absolute error for step wind profile and variable speed wind profile was found to be improved by 97.65% and 97.29%, respectively, with the proposed novel deloading technique with fuzzy-PID compared to PID. Further, to ensure the implementation viability of the proposed control scheme, real-time validation of the same is carried out on OPAL-RT 4510, having a Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA board. It was found that for all the scenarios considered for real-time digital simulation purposes, the results unerringly matched with MATLAB/Simulink.