Best Practices To Follow When Tapering For Your Target Events
In this episode of our Explaining Training podcast, we talk through tapering tips for cyclists in order to lay out some practical advice around what you might want to do ahead of key races and events, including mistakes to avoid and the best practices to follow.
[You can find the transcript from the episode below the player]
Most athletes are going to be aware that tapering broadly involves a reduction in overall training load.
The idea is that this load reduction allows you to shed fatigue in order to raise your form without losing too much in the way of fitness.
When we say “fitness”, this is effectively your physiological capabilities, such as lactate threshold, VO2max and so on, but does include technique, psychological preparedness and other skills too.
Form is distinct from fitness in that it encompasses both your fitness level and your day-to-day fatigue status and the relationship or ratio between the two. If fatigue is high, you’re likely gonna struggle to be able to capitalise on your full fitness potential and that’s really why a taper is important.
If you taper your training off too severely though, fitness levels can start to decline, where even though you might be carrying little in the way of fatigue, your ability to perform at your best may be reduced.
With a good taper, we’re looking to hit that goldilocks zone where fitness and fatigue are in a perfect harmony.
Now there are a few different variables we can look at and should consider when it comes to designing a taper, such as the length, the extent to which volume is reduced, and what types of sessions to include or exclude.
Let’s look at each of these in turn,
Length Of Taper
So starting with the length or duration of the taper, this is a variable athletes often don’t quite get right.
It’s common to find literature suggesting a taper should be around 2 weeks, or sometimes even longer, and this recommendation seems mostly to be born out of computer simulations of fitness and fatigue, and how these variables change over time.
In our experience though, two or more weeks of tapering is usually that little bit too long for most cyclists, where an excessive amount of fitness can be lost compared to if a shorter taper was used.
We find that many cyclists instead benefit to a larger extent from a taper that’s more like 7 days in length and those who recover very quickly may even benefit from taper periods that last even less than a week, though the length of the taper is dependant on the nature of the event or events being prepared for.
For longer endurance events, such as sportives or stage races, athletes will often benefit from a slightly longer taper of perhaps 12 days or so.
For shorter or higher intensity events, such as cyclocross or criterium races, a taper lasting a week or less is likely to be more appropriate and optimal.
Whilst we’re not aware of any research that directly looks at how the length of the taper is related to the event type, our anecdotal experience suggests that it’s at least partly due to the differences in how quickly you recover from central and peripheral-based fatigue.
Longer duration events cause more of the former, and this is also the type of fatigue that seems to take longer to recover from. Based on this, it’s smart to make sure you’re carrying minimal central fatigue into these kind of events.
Comparatively, shorter duration and higher intensity events are limited more by peripheral fatigue at the muscle site, such as glycogen depletion. This is a type of fatigue that we can recover from more quickly, and this is maybe one reason why we need to taper for less time for these demands.
Volume Reduction
Moving on from taper length, the next consideration is to what extent your training volume might want to be reduced in a taper period.
The main headline from the scientific literature is that a gradual reduction in volume over time is the way to go.
At the beginning of a taper period, you may start by reducing the duration of your sessions by only 10-20%, and as you get closer to your target event, volume may then reduce more acutely by around by 30-40%.
If you were executing a 2-week taper for a long duration event for example, then we could simplify this by having the first week at roughly 80% of usual training volume, and the second week at closer to 60%. With a week-long taper, you might instead plan more of a pronounced volume reduction, so perhaps more of an abrupt lowering to 60-70% of usual volume.
Speaking of lowering training volume leads to the related question of whether you should be taking days off during your taper.
The scientific literature tends to suggest that taking extra days off is actually not beneficial when tapering, at least not close to your key events.
Instead, looking to maintain your usual training frequency could be a better way to go.
So if you usually train 5 days per week, aiming to keep this frequency during your taper can be a good approach, where you’d then focus more on shortening individual workout durations in order to reduce your overall volume.
The reason days off aren’t optimal isn’t entirely clear, but time off the bike can cause acute issues like a reduction in blood plasma volume, which in turn can result in a drop in VO2max, so this may be one factor.
Adjusting Intensity
Next, we’ll talk about whether you should make any changes to the intensity of your training.
When we look at the practices of top-level athletes across a number of endurance sports, we can see that almost all include some intensive training above their threshold within the week before key competitions.
This is also a practice that we’ve tried and tested with amateur athletes in our own coaching too, and we find that some intensity during the taper is widely beneficial.
A good structure if you were racing on a Sunday might be to include a slightly abridged interval session on the Tuesday earlier in the week, and then perform an openers-style session 1-2 days before your competition. An example of an abridged workout could be if you usually perform a session consisting of 4x 8-minute intervals above threshold, then on the Tuesday this might be adjusted to 3x 8 minutes or 4x 6 minutes at the same intensity targets.
Switching focus to an openers session for a moment then, these usually have two key goals. The first is to include a little intensity at a race-like effort to help prepare your muscles and psychology for racing.
When performing some short efforts at a race-like intensity, you’ll hopefully find that you’re feeling good, and this should serve to give you some confidence that your taper has been effective.
Secondly, for events that are likely to start out above your threshold power, there may also be a benefit to including some hard efforts in your openers session that help to prime your aerobic system.
These have been shown to improve so-called ‘VO2 on-kinetics’ so that the aerobic system responds more quickly at the start of the race, leading to less accumulation of fatigue related metabolites.
A recent study indicates that a good way to do this is to include 3-4x 30-second sprints within your openers session. In recreationally trained athletes, research has shown that sprints like this can have a benefit that lasts up to 3 days, though we suspect in more well-trained athletes, the benefits might be curtailed somewhat.
Aside from these key intensive sessions, we’d recommend keeping the remainder of your training generally at a low intensity, for example below 65% FTP, 65% Max heart rate, or a 3/10 effort level for example.
Cross-Training
The last component we’ll discuss here is in relation to tapering is cross-training, i.e workout modalities that aren’t your primary sporting activity, like weight training or running for a cyclist.
When tapering for a key event, we’d recommend cutting down on any of this non bike-specific training.
This will help to shed even more fatigue while allowing you to concentrate on the training that will give you the best chance of maintaining bike-specific fitness in the short-term.
Summary
So to wrap things up, we think the key attributes of a good taper are that:
It’s fairly short - something between 5-12 days seems to work well for most.
Training volume is reduced by between 20 and 40%, mainly through shortening training sessions, rather than taking extra days off the bike.
Some intensive sessions above threshold are maintained, while the rest of your training is largely performed at lower intensities and
Any cross training is removed from your plan.
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