The Art of "TAPERING"

MS Integrative Physiology
USA Cycling Federation
Certified Level II Coach

Tapering is a short-term reduction in training load before competition to enhance performance. In any type of endurance event, top performance is achieved if the athletes get to the competition highly trained but well rested and competition 'hungry'. As a coach and a scientist I can tell that this 'perfect balance' is one of the most difficult goals to achieve in a training program. Coaches and athletes can design their training plans but it's an all different level of challenge defining a reduction of the training load that reverses training-induced fatigue without a loss of the training adaptations.

This article will provide guidelines on how to reduce training load and for how long before competition that are valid for any type of endurance sport. In order to understand how to reduce training load, we need to know what the components of a training load are. They are: volume, intensity and frequency. Reducing training load means to reduce one or more of these components or a combination of them. First of all it's important to measure the load of each training session in terms of 'time of training (hours/minutes)' and the average intensity (RPE: rate of perceiving effort) during that time.

Reducing intensity to reduce training load is not an effective tapering.

Research studies analyzed three different types of tapering: one group reduced volume keeping high intensity; one group reduced intensity and kept moderate volume and one group completely rested. The results showed that only the group who reduced volume and kept high intensity had a significant increase in performance. They enhanced their time to exhaustion, their glycogen storage and their CS (citrate syntase: a key enzyme in the aerobic metabolism pathway used as a marker to assess training status). So, a reduction of training load reducing intensity does not provide any significant performance enhancement. An example of this type of load reduction could be: keep training 12 hours a week, 2-3 hours a day, 5 days a week but keeping the intensity of the training sessions in the endurance zone (70-75% of VO2max) below lactate threshold eliminating, for example, all the interval sessions.

Instead, the effective way of tapering is keeping high intensity and reducing the volume. How much? Reduction can be up to 75% of the total training volume you have before start tapering. Scientific studies report that the best volume reduction is between 40 and 60%. Examples of reducing volume keeping high intensity are: for your 'tempo sessions' is to still training at 80% of your VO2max but for only 40 min instead of 1 hour and reducing the total session time to 2 hours instead of 3 hours; for your intervals sessions, keep the same intensity (91%-105% of your threshold power for threshold intervals and 106%-120% of your threshold power for VO2max intervals) and reduce the volume or reducing the length of each interval and keeping the same number or keep the same length and reduce the total number of intervals per set or per session; the latter is suggested. Whether reducing the length of each interval or reduce the number depends on the individual athlete. Each athlete can respond differently to the two ways of volume reduction. Here the role and the art of coaching beyond the science come into place.

What about frequency? Frequency is how often the training sessions occur and how many they are per week. There is some scientific evidence showing that elite athletes should NOT reduce the frequency (for example: they should not increase the number of recovery days or alternate working days with rest days); more recreational athletes seem to have advantages in reducing frequency as well.

The volume reduction has to be linear or progressive?

Research studies indicate performance enhancement in case of non-linear decrease of volume. Therefore reducing, for example, 5% of volume every day is not effective. Reducing 50% of volume right the way and keep that 50% volume for the rest of the tapering period is not effective either. The reduction should be greater at the beginning of the tapering phase and less as competition approaches. For example, reduce the training volume from 100% to 50% in the first 5 days of tapering and then keep reducing but a slower rate up to 25% by the 14th day of tapering (in case of 2 weeks of total tapering) for a TOTAL of 75% reduction since you start tapering.

• From 4 days to 14 days for cyclists and triathletes
• 7 days for runners
• Up to 28 days for swimmers

The magnitude of the performance enhancement is an average of 3% (between 0.5% and 6%). Scientific studies show no decrease in VO2max as a consequence of tapering up to 20 days.

No scientific studies have been conducted for multiple tapering periods in case of multiple peak periods for multiple key competitions within one season. However, from my own experience I would suggest longer tapering period for the 2nd or 3rd peak of the season or alternate more recovery days to training sessions in case of master and older athletes.

In conclusion: during tapering keep high intensity and reduce the volume of your training progressively and non linearly for a period of time varying from 4 days up to 3 weeks before competition.

These are guidelines, however, studies show a high individual variability, each athlete responds differently. The length of the tapering period depends on the training status, on the level of overload and fatigue, from the age and gender. In fact, female athletes show a less improvement than male after tapering.

Here the role of a coach gets in. Each coach should watch, know and listen to his/her athlete, know his/her time to recovery, how fast his/her detrains, let him/her try different paradigms and record which one is more effective for each athlete. My philosophy of training is based on science but defining the details of these tapering guidelines to tailor them on the specificity of each athlete to bring him or her to success is a fine work of art.

References for this article are:
"Peaking and Tapering for Endurance Performance" by Dr. Inigo