Searching the web about the best taper for a race I found the following text to be the best. It was written by Greg Howther, a research scientist, and I would like to thank him for sharing. As I wrote yesterday I am following in these days a 7 day taper reducing the interval work gradually while approaching race day. Friday off, saturday half an hour on the bike with some sprint and Sunday race day.
Tapering for competition
[This article originally appeared in the April 2000 issue of Northwest Runner magazine.]
This month's topic is tapering, i.e., reducing one's training load in preparation for an important end-of-season race. It doesn't take an exercise scientist to determine that you should take it easy before a big race, but how exactly should you do this? Should you cruise through a few final "tune-up" intervals, limit yourself to slow jogs around the block, or just lie in bed for a few days? As we shall see, the best-designed studies tend to favor the first approach.
I refer to the "best-designed" studies because many investigations of tapering are poorly controlled and thus yield difficult-to-interpret results. A typically unenlightening study will test some athletes at mid-season and again at the end of the season and will report that, lo and behold, they're faster at the end. But is this due to the end-of-season taper itself, the high-quality training done just prior to the taper, a placebo effect (they think they're ready to perform better and therefore do), the superior competition offered by the end-of-season championships, or something else? It's hard to say for sure. In light of these issues, this article focuses on studies that compare different types of tapers (and thus minimize the influence of factors unrelated to the tapers themselves).
Mileage: less is more
Many runners, myself included, are hesitant to cut their weekly mileage by more than 25% prior to a race out of fear that they will lose some of their hard-earned fitness. Nevertheless, research indicates that drastic short-term reductions in training volume do not in and of themselves compromise performance. For instance, Shepley et al. (Journal of Applied Physiology 72: 706-711, 1992) and Houmard et al. (Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 26: 624-631, 1994) subjected veteran runners to treadmill tests before and after a one-week taper which reduced their mileage by 70-85%. Following the taper, these athletes performed significantly better on the treadmill tests (which were designed to simulate 1500- and 5000-meter races) than they had before the taper.
Studies of highly trained swimmers (Mujika et al., Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology 20: 395-406, 1995) and triathletes (Banister et al., European Journal of Applied Physiology 79: 182-191, 1999) also support the idea that "less is more." When the swimmers reduced their training volume by 10-40% for three weeks, a good correlation was found between the percentage reduction in volume and the percentage improvement in performance. That is, the swimmers who swam the least during the three-week period performed best in their post-taper races. Similarly, when two groups of tapering triathletes were compared, the group that trained less over a 13-day period performed better on an intense post-taper cycling test.
If a volume reduction of 40-85% is acceptable, how about a reduction of 100%? Shepley's subjects, as well as some of Houmard's, were subjected to this regimen as well. After seven days of no running, the subjects did about as well on the treadmill as they had prior to the taper.
The above results suggest that, while runners can take several days off without suffering greatly, a small training load is preferable to none at all. Additional studies on swimmers (Neufer et al., Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 19: 486-490, 1987) and weightlifters (Gibala et al., International Journal of Sports Medicine 15: 492-497, 1994) have reached similar conclusions.
Training intensity: more is more
Assuming that you cut lots of miles out of your schedule while tapering, how fast should you run those remaining miles? In the above-cited studies by Shepley et al. and Houmard et al., the low mileage subjects completed several brief-but-challenging interval workouts during their seven-day taper. These subjects performed better after the taper than beforehand, in contrast to subjects (in the Shepley study) whose taper consisted entirely of easy jogging. Thus, small doses of high-quality intervals appear to maximize the effectiveness of a pre-race taper.
Modeling a shapely taper
A final question one might ask about tapering is, should reductions in training volume be gradual or sudden? Based on a mathematical model of performance, Banister et al. hypothesized that an exponential reduction in training volume (in which daily mileage is gradually diminished over several days) would be superior to a step reduction (in which daily mileage is suddenly dropped and then held constant thereafter). They then conducted a ten-day taper with two groups of triathletes: an "exponential" group and a "step" group. Following the taper, the exponentially tapered group outperformed the step-tapered group on a stationary bicycle test, supporting the idea that training volume should be reduced gradually and progressively as race day approaches.
In conclusion, don't be afraid to try scaling your workouts way back in the final seven to 14 days before a major competition. Obviously, you can't do this before every race; that would prevent you from getting much training in. When you need to run your absolute best, however, an emphasis on high-quality workouts and extremely low mileage should help you fulfill your potential.
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