Tapering – Get ready to compete!

Alfredo Valdés 13 min. of reading Sports Leave a comment

Today, we are going to talk about a concept that may sound familiar if you are endurance athletes: Tapering.

Physical exercise is a stressor or external stimulus that subjects our organism to a series of functional and structural alterations due to the exercise itself (Hughes, Ellefsen and Baar, 2017).

Have you ever wondered why endurance athletes adapt and improve their capacity and strength athletes improve their nervous efficiency?

The tissues from the organism are plastic and they will adapt to a specific work volume.

But, are adaptations linear? If we adapt to the workout and improve our performance, do we have to exercise even on the same day of the competition?

Keep reading because I am going to explain what you should do to get ready for a competition!

Index

1 What is tapering?
2 Going through basic training methodology
3 Effects of Tapering
4 Types of tapering
5 How to do tapering
6 Conclusions
7 Bibliography
8 Related Entries

What is tapering?

It consists of reaching a peak form by reducing the exercise for a variable period of time. Consequently, we will decrease the daily physiological and psychological stress and improve our sport performance.

Figure I. Recovery phase during the “alarm” stage in GAS (Adapted from Zatsiorsky and Kraemer, 2006).

But before we continue, let’s review a series of concepts that will help us understand this phenomenon better.

Going through basic training methodology

What is the Homeostasis?

It is the physiological balance that our body tries to maintain. Everything is perfectly under control so that nothing is out of what is supposed to be normal.

The adaptation processes are nothing else than necessary steps that our body needs to carry out to maintain this homeostasis.

Le Chântelier’s Principle

To put it briefly:

“Before any disturbance caused by an external factor, our body will adapt to that factor in order to recover its equilibrium.”

Physical exercise is an external factor that is sequentially repeated for a period of time. Therefore, our body can make the decision to produce structural and functional changes in its systems to adapt to this constant stimulus.

General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS)

It reflects how the ability of our baseline organism (normal resistance level) drops due to an stressor (physical exercise) in the “alarm stage”. Consequently, our body produces a series of counter adaptations in order to be ready to face an stimulus of the same profile (a level over the baseline).

Figure II. General Adaptation Syndrome (Estremera et al., 2017).

This level remains for a specific period of time in the “resistance stage”. Then, if there are no more alarms, the body will start to undo the adaptations during the “exhaustion stage”, since it no longer needs said them.

Supercompensation Principle

The General Adaptation Syndrome is closely connected to the Supercompensation Principle.

Figure III. Supercompensation Principle (Jensen, 2016).

It is a breakdown of the “alarm stage”.

This is important because we can find 3 types of adaptation depending on the workout volume:

Positive: Adaptive
Null: Ineffective
Negative: Disadaptive

Figure IV. Supercompensation profiles depending on the magnitude and frequency of the workouts (Zatsiorsky and Kraemer, 2006).

Effects of Tapering

On Endurance Sports

Tapering is a process that has been deeply studied in endurance sports. In fact, there are a lot of studies that partly explain the physiological adaptations to this process:

A good tapering (because it can be harmful if it is not done properly) will have the following effects:

Stimulating the glycogen synthase activity (more liver-muscle glycogen content increasing the energy deposits).
Stimulating the activity of the citrate synthase, one of the TCA isoenzymes (more efficacy oxidizing nutrients to obtain energy).
Increasing the blood volume and erythropoiesis (more oxygen transport to the active muscle tissue). Shepley et al., 1992.

All this will improve the performance of athletes: higher oxygen consumption, higher maximal voluntary contraction, less respiratory quotient… Consequently, it will delay the fatigue and increase the speed.

On Strength Sports

The effects on strength are not that clear. In fact, most of them are hypotheses or we will probably find mixed evidence.

The main principles related to this phenomenon are:

An increase of the neuromuscular efficiency.
An increase of the physiological cross-sectional area.
Alterations in the ratio of types of muscle fibers.
Batter psychological indexes (motivation, stress, mood…).

Types of tapering

There are 3 types of tapering:

Linear: Reducing the exercise progressively until reaching a pre-competition minimum.
Exponential: Reducing the exercise suddenly at the beginning and slowly towards the end. This type of tapering has two variants.
- Slow Decay: A more controlled drop.
- Fast Decay: A drastic drop.
Step: Reducing the exercise drastically and maintaining this charge throughout the entire taper.

How to do tapering

A tapering is carried out by changing the workout variables: volume, intensity, frequency, duration…

In order to produce a supercompensation and improve the performance more than before the tapering itself.

But, how do I adapt the exercise variables to improve my performance?

The most realistic response is that these variables had to be individually determined for each athlete, according to the specific adaptation profile to the workout.

Let’s review two practical examples: one for endurance and another for strength athletes.

Tapering for cyclists

A cyclist starts at 0 and cycles 600km a week distributed in 6 sessions per week, at an average intensity of a 65% of their Maximum Heart Rate.

Cycling
Days	Km per session	Sessions per week	Average intensity per session	Km per week
0 (before starting)	100	6/6 – 1st Week	65% MAX. RATE	600
1	90	1/6 – 1st Week	65% MAX. RATE	445
2	85	2/6 – 1st Week	65% MAX. RATE
3	80	3/6 – 1st Week	70% MAX. RATE
4	70	4/6 – 1st Week	65% MAX. RATE
5	65	5/6 – 1st Week	72% MAX. RATE
6	55	6/6 – 1st Week	80% MAX. RATE
7	REST	REST	REST
8	48	1/4 – 2nd Week	65% MAX. RATE	173
9	45	2/4 – 2nd Week	80% MAX. RATE
10	REST	REST	REST
11	40	3/4 – 2nd Week	90% MAX. RATE
12	40	4/4 – 2nd Week	50% MAX. RATE
13	REST	REST	REST

And this is the progression during a taper:

Blue: Volume, Orange: Rate, Gray: Intensity, Yellow: Weekly Volume.

Tapering for powerlifting

A powerlifter starts at 0 and does 30 weekly sets of bench press, distributed in 3 sessions per week, at an average intensity of 90% of the last 1RM test.

Powerlifting
Days	Daily bench press sessions	Sessions per movement per week	%1RM	Total series per week
0 (before starting)	10	3/3 – 0 Week	90	30
1	9	1/3 – 1st Week	90	24
2	0	REST	REST
3	8	2/3 – 1st Week	95
4	0	REST	REST
5	7	3/3 – 1st Week	90
6	0	REST	REST
7	0	REST	REST
8	0	REST	REST	15
9	8	1/2 – 2nd Week	95
10	8	REST	REST
11	7	2/2 – 2nd Week	102
12	6	REST	REST
13	5	REST	REST
14	5	REST	REST

And this is the progression during a taper:

Conclusions

Tapering is a process that involves reducing the exercise progressively so that you will compete in a better shape.
The exponential taper patters (progressive) with a fast decay are superior to other taper models, although not for cycling.
Training volume is the main factor that we need to adjust during a taper, therefore, you have to reduce it in a 40-60%.
Do not alter the intensity, you still need to follow a quality training routine.
Changes in the frequency are irrelevant and they will be motivated by the weekly total training volume during the taper.
Ideally, a taper should last between 8 and 14 days, even though this will be determined by the workout and the mesocycle before the taper.
Not doing exercise for 3-5 days is also effective when it comes to improving the performance in strength sports.
However, not doing exercise for 3 weeks produces disadaptations to the training stimulus at a structural and neural level.
Not doing exercise is not recommended in endurance sports due to the quick disadaptations.

Have you ever done a taper? Let us know how it was!

Bibliography

Hughes, D. C., Ellefsen, S., & Baar, K. (2018). Adaptations to endurance and strength training. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine, 8(6).
Estremera Rodrigo, A. (2017). Influencia de las variables socio-demográficas y laborales en los valores de estrés determinados con el modelo desequilibrio esfuerzo recompensa de Siegrist (Tesis Doctoral).
Jensen, U. (2016). Design Considerations and Application Examples for Embedded Classification Systems.
Zatsiorsky, V., & Kraemer, W. (1995). Science and practice of strength training. In Choice Reviews Online (Vol. 33).
Shepley, B., MacDougall, J. D., Cipriano, N., Sutton, J. R., Tarnopolsky, M. A., & Coates, G. (1992). Physiological effects of tapering in highly trained athletes. Journal of Applied Physiology, 72(2), 706–711.