 Hey what's up everyone welcome to another video my name is Dylan and I'm a cycling coach at CTS and today we're going to be talking about how to taper before a race. We all know that we need to reduce our training load before a big event to feel fresh on race day but if you do it improperly you could end up with stale legs or losing fitness throughout a season and it would be better if you just didn't taper at all. What does the science have to say about tapering? How long should a taper be and should we be reducing volume or intensity or both? What should the week leading up to a big race look like? I'll be answering all these questions in this upcoming video. If you're new to this channel I make weekly training topic videos going over tips and tricks that I've learned in my 12 years of racing experience that have gotten me to the top of the ultra endurance mountain bike game in the US and as a cycling coach at CTS. If you want to learn how to get faster or just more about the science of training in general be sure to subscribe and if you have a question or a topic you'd like to see me cover in a future video be sure to leave it in the comment section down below. I do my best to get to all the questions in the comments. I've been getting a lot of requests to do a tapering video and that's probably because tapering is one of the hardest things to get right. How many times have you heard someone say, ah man I just totally screwed up my taper. I was peaking like two days ago on the group ride but today for the race during a start my legs just felt flat. Now whether or not that's true or maybe some of us just aren't quite as strong as we think we are tapering is still a critical part of racing. Tapering is a balance between too much and too little and finding the right balance requires experimentation but there's also quite a bit of science on tapering that we can use to guide ourselves. Let's start with whether or not you should reduce volume or intensity during your taper and this brings me to two detraining studies with one very important difference. One reduced volume and the other reduced intensity. In both studies subjects trained for 10 weeks and then either had a one third or two thirds reduction in training load for 15 weeks. The difference was that in the one study they reduced training load by reducing volume and in the other study they reduced training load by reducing intensity. So what were the results? In the study that reduced intensity long-term endurance was decreased significantly by 21% in the one-thirds reduced group and by 30% in the two-thirds reduced group. However in the study that decreased volume long-term endurance remained the same in the one-third group but decreased by 10% in the two-thirds reduction group. Now 15 weeks is longer than any taper you would ever do but there is some important information that we can gather from these studies. It appears that when reducing our training load reducing the volume and not the intensity is the best way to go if we don't want to lose fitness and this tapering method has been confirmed in other studies in the scientific literature. A meta-analysis looking at many studies on the effects of tapering on performance found that the optimal tapering strategy was one that reduced volume without any modifications in intensity or frequency. They also found a sweet spot for reducing training volume at 40 to 60% and it isn't just this study that recommends a 50% reduction in training volume. A study looking at different stepwise reduction taper protocols on cycling performance had subjects reduce their training volume during a seven-day taper by 30, 50, or 80%. The results showed that performance time was significantly faster during a simulated 20k TT with the 50% reduction in volume but not with the 30 or 80% reduction. Okay so we know we need to reduce the training volume by about half and keep the intensity and the frequency of our rides high but how long should the taper be? This is one of the more difficult questions to answer and I say this because there isn't a clear scientific consensus. Going back to the meta-analysis from earlier they found that the optimal taper length was two weeks. However in another article for the scientific basis for pre-competition tapering they found that the optimal time ranges between four and 28 days. Why such a big variation? They concluded that tapering duration must be individually determined for each athlete in accordance with their specific profiles of adaptation to training on the one hand and loss of training-induced adaptations on the other hand. A review article on training for triathlon also cited four to 28 days and stated that there is a great individual variability in the optimal taper length. An important consideration for the length of your taper is how many events you plan to do throughout a season. If you're just training for one event then you may be able to get away with a longer taper but if you're training for a race series or you have multiple important races on your calendar then repeatedly doing long tapers all the time will lead to a loss of fitness. Going back to the study on triathletes they stated that there may be reduced opportunities to taper because of repeated racing during the competitive period. Peaking for major competitions every two to four weeks poses a problem of choosing between recovering from previous competition and then rebuilding fitness or maintaining intensive training and capitalizing on adaptations acquired during the previous training cycle. Basically tapering is a tradeoff between how much fitness you're willing to lose and how fresh you want your legs to be on race day. Another consideration for the length of the taper is whether or not you overload your training before the taper. From the same study the optimal duration of the taper for a given athlete varies with the training done before the taper. Greater training volume and or intensity before the taper may increase performance gains but would require a longer taper. Raising your training load right before a taper is a great way to eke out a little bit more fitness right before the event but you got to be careful because you don't want to be on the starting line with fatigued legs so a longer taper is necessary if you go that route. That was a lot of information so let's take a minute to apply it and I'll show you what a taper should actually look like from start to finish. There are a couple things to consider when deciding how many days out from an event you want to start your taper. As I've said tapering is a tradeoff between having fresh legs and losing fitness. With this in mind the most important factor for determining how long your taper should be is how important the event is to you and how many other important events you have after it. As I said if you're just training for one race then you can get away with a long taper. However if you're trying to string together a whole season of races you don't want your tapers to be too long or you'll lose fitness throughout the season. This is how I usually break it down. For A priority races you want to taper for a week to two weeks. For B priority races you want to taper for about half a week and for C priority races which are basically just training races you don't want to taper at all. Wait no taper for training races? But everyone knows that the Wednesday night training crate is the only thing that matters and plus they give away free socks on the preem laps. How else am I supposed to justify spending two thousand dollars on a pair of carbon wheels if not to win a pair of free socks? I'm gonna set up an example of a typical training week and then show you how we might modify it for each scenario. So for our example let's say we are riding 12 hours a week and here's what our typical training schedule looks like. We've got high intensity days on Tuesday and Saturday, shorter endurance rides on Wednesday and Thursday, a recovery ride on Friday, and a long ride on Sunday. Now this is just an example and obviously everyone's training schedule is different but given this schedule I'll show you how I would modify it for different priority races and let's start with the C priority race. With our C race on Saturday I wouldn't change anything about the week just act as if Saturday's race is taking the place of the hard workout that you would normally do that day. The only change that I would make to this week is if it was an endurance event and then I might reduce Sunday's volume or just make it a recovery day since you rode for so long on Saturday. For a B priority race I would move the recovery ride to Thursday and have Friday be a pre-race workout. Now your pre-race workout depends on a lot of factors like what type of race you're doing, how well trained you are, and your own experimentation but in general you want it to be one to two hours of light endurance riding with some opener efforts to get your legs ready to go hard the following day. You don't want to ride so long or so hard that you're fatigued. Again what is too much or too little for the day before a race varies person to person. Just like with the other week I would decide whether or not to reduce Sunday's volume based on how long the race was on Saturday. You can also decide whether or not you want to reduce Wednesday's volume based on how important the race is to you. If it's a more important B race then you might want to reduce the training volume on Wednesday but if you're just trying to train through this B race then I would keep the volume on Wednesday the same. Now let's talk about tapering for A races which is really the most important when it comes to tapering and the one that can be the most easily screwed up. I want to stress here that this requires experimentation to find out what tapering method works the best for you. Some people may respond better to a one week taper while other people may need two weeks. If you decide to overload your training before the taper I would definitely go with at least two weeks. I'll go ahead and get into a couple different examples. So here we've got a one week taper where Monday would be a rest day, Tuesday would be a recovery ride and on Wednesday we'd have a high intensity session. Now this mid week high intensity session should be extremely high intensity but it shouldn't leave you fatigued. So how do we do this? Well let's say for example a typical VO2 max workout for you is four four minute efforts as hard as you can go. Then maybe instead of doing four four minute efforts you just do two four minute efforts but they should still be as hard as you can go. Let's now take a look at a week and a half taper. So with this strategy the first half of the week two weeks out will look the same but then we'll get into a pattern where we go hard easy hard easy all the way up until the race. These hard days again should not destroy you so you want to reduce the number of intervals you do. Hard easy hard easy is one pattern but if you feel like you need more rest you can also do your hard day every third day so that you have two easy days between each hard day. What I wouldn't do is have any in between rides. Your rides during your taper should either be extremely hard intervals done at or above threshold or extremely easy zone one to low zone two rides. For the two week taper you want to gradually reduce your volume so the first Tuesday and Wednesday might be an hour and a half instead of two hours. Tuesday would be a full interval workout instead of a reduced one and Wednesday might be a longer recovery ride. We then go into the same pattern of easy hard easy hard. The exception to this would be if you overloaded your training the previous week in which case I would make Tuesday an hour recovery Wednesday a full interval workout and then two more recovery days before we get into the easy hard easy hard pattern. These are just examples and as I said you're going to have to experiment and the optimal tapering strategy for you is going to depend on what kind of racing you're doing and how well trained you are as well as some other factors. The big takeaway here is this when tapering you want to reduce your volume by about half and keep your intensity high. The length of the taper will vary person to person but overall it's a trade-off between how fresh you want your legs to be and how much fitness you're willing to lose. If you're racing every month and for every race you do a two week taper you're going to lose fitness throughout the season. This can even happen with a one week taper so be sure that you choose the races that you taper for wisely. Lastly overloading your training before taper can be an effective strategy but if you do so make sure you go with a longer taper so that you're not fatigued on the starting line. If you want to learn more about how overloading your training can lead to greater fitness gains then I talked all about it in my blog prioritization video and I'll leave the link for that in the description below. Thanks for watching and I hope you guys found this information helpful. If you like this video be sure to give it a like, share it with a friend and subscribe for more and if you want to see more training and racing content be sure to follow me on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and if you want to follow my training be sure to check me out on Strava. Finally if you're looking for a coach shoot me an email at djohnson at trainwright.com