Tapering

Tapering this week.

What!!! I hear you say, I thought you didn't do that stuff anymore.

Well yes and no. I am not racing triathlon anymore, but it doesn't mean I am not racing at all. This Sunday I will be doing a paddling race. This particular race is the Flatwater Sprint Championships and so it is a bit of a big deal in the local paddling community. I would like to do okay at the event (well at least as well as I can) so I am taking it a bit more seriously. hence the tapering.

Tapering is a funny beast in my mind and one that seems to cause a lot of people confusion. It is certainly an area that prompts a lot of questions from athletes. It seems that often people aren't sure what they are trying to achieve with a taper and how to go about it.

The idea behind a taper is really pretty straight forward. Generally you train pretty hard for your races and you get fairly tired doing so. Obviously you don't want to be fatigued going into your race so the idea of a taper is to get rid of that fatigue. Simple enough. So how is the best way to go about this recovery period.

Given that the whole point of a taper is to recover, the temptation is to simply sit on the couch and eat chocolate for a week, which is exactly what some people do. This is not a good idea for a couple of reasons. Obviously sitting around all day and eating chocolate isn't a good idea (although a tasty one), but there is more to it than that. What we know is that if you simply sit around you will certainly recover and reduce fatigue, but you will also lose race fitness and generally you will end up feeling pretty terrible rather than better. Athletes spend a lot of time training hard and so when you remove this load all together we typically end up feeling lethargic and horrible rather than better and we usually race accordingly.

Okay, so cold turkey on training isn't a good idea. So how much training is right.

Well, the amount of load that a person can sustain and still taper effectively depends on a lot of factors, things like how fit a person is, how fatigued they are before the taper, how well they sleep during taper week etc. To make it a bit simpler there are a number of tools out there that help track this data (TrainingPeaks is an example) and can help advise on how much training is too much or too little to help strike a balance between recovering and maintaining fitness.

These tools are very handy and make it much easier to taper effectively, but these tools aside, what is some general guidance on tapering?

Well, the guidance I typically go by is that you want to keep a roughly similar training routine as you normally would, but that within that taper week you want to remove a lot of volume and quite a bit of intensity. That means that if you usually train every day, you probably want to keep training every day, however, those sessions might now be much shorter. By the time you get to race eve the 'training' session might just be 20 minutes to roll the legs over and loosen up. You will also notice above that I have said removing MOST intensity, I didn't say ALL intensity. A concept that many people struggle with is that you are still okay to do efforts in taper week. In fact you want to do some efforts to help focus the body and mind on what it is about to do. Once again just going out and training easy all week will have you end up feeling lethargic and a bit horrible, your body will need to do a bit of hard work.

Early in the week I am normally pretty comfortable doing a standard threshold session. Later in the week I wouldn't normally do quite so much work, but I would definitely be doing a few 1 or 2 minute race pace efforts, run throughs etc. I guess one of the keys with taper week is don't be afraid to train. Trust your body and the amount of training you have put into it. After all, if you can't recover from training during taper week then you might want to question if you are adequately prepared for your event.

All the above needs to be taken in moderation though. I would certainly train once a day if that is normal routine, but I probably wouldn't train twice a day, you are meant to be resting after all. I always strip weights out of my program in taper week as you don't want to be creating new muscle fatigue. Similarly taper week is not the time to be trying anything new that is going to result in you being sore for a couple of days. It also isn't just about training load, adequate sleep and eating properly etc also play a huge part.

Tapering well is important and admittedly it is a bit tricky, but it doesn't have to be completely confounding. Keep active and be sensible.