I personally have not taken a designated deload week that was not ‘forced’ in like 2 years now. I think as long as you train smart, eat right, sleep well, etc you don’t need to take deloads often. I think your body will tell you if you have been going to hard just listen to it. But everyone is different I have a friend that takes deloads like every month or so.

Deloads as in a full week break from training generally isn’t the recommended way to deload, active deloads is the way to go. You also have to take into consideration that different groups of muscle accumulate fatigue at different rates. Your forearms and shoulders won’t need as much rest as you posterior chain, etc…

If you go heavy on compound exercises and you aren’t a freak of nature like Eddie Hall that can progressively overloaded every week into a ~400kg DL, you’ll likely experience at some point that you (temporarily) regress in strength. That would be a clear sign that you should have deloaded already.

Most people I see in the gym don’t push themselves anywhere near hard enough for deloads to be a necessity though. So you need to do some introspection and ask yourself if you consistently train hard enough for fatigue to truly accumulate, or if you mostly show up at the gym and just autoregulate based on your feel for the day. Neither approaches as necessarily right or wrong.

I play amateur league soccer and I’ve learned to use the off season as deload periods, otherwise I’ll get overuse injuries. I’l still try keep moving, but I’ll do lighter training or something other than my ordinary training schedule.