 It's race week. You've done your training and you're in good shape. Now with one week to go before the race, you just want to get to the morning of the race feeling fresh and ready to go without losing fitness or feeling too tired on the starting line. Basically, you don't want to screw things up this late in the game. This can be easier said than done though because just like most things in training and actually just life in general for that matter, this last week requires balance. Do too much and you might be tired for your race, but do too little and you might lose fitness or feel like your legs are stale on the starting line. Staleness is a phenomenon that occurs when highly trained people stop training and then instead of feeling well rested, they actually feel like they have no punch and their legs need to be woken up again before they can go hard. None of that is what you want on race day, so an optimal tapering strategy or an easing up of training right before the race is required. Today, we're going to be getting into what the science has to say an optimal tapering strategy looks like and at the end of the video, I'll be giving you examples of what your training should look like in the weeks leading into a big race. Perhaps a good place to start would be with the fundamental question. Is tapering actually effective at improving performance and if so, by how much? This review on the scientific basis for pre-competition tapering strategies found that tapering does in fact have a positive effect on performance due to changes in the physiological status of the athlete and a typical improvement in performance is around 3% and can range from 0.5% to 6%. So yes, reducing training load right before a big race does result in improved performance. Most of us probably intuitively already knew that. Overall, training makes you tired and being tired is probably not good for a race. This still leaves us with a lot of questions though, like how long do you need to taper for? How much do you need to decrease your training load and what is the best way to decrease your training load? Should you decrease your volume or how much you're training or should you decrease your intensity or how hard your training? These are all questions that have been put to the test and let's start with this volume or intensity question because it actually may be the most important one. One of the biggest concerns from highly motivated athletes when you start talking about tapering is fitness loss. No one wants to lose fitness that they've worked so hard to gain in the week right before a race. I know man, that's probably the reason why I can drop everybody on the Sunday social coffee ride but then I get to a race and I'm lucky if I get mid-pack. It all makes sense now. As it turns out, when reducing volume or intensity, one will actually lead to more fitness loss than the other. Two very similar studies done by the same researchers set out to answer the question of how much fitness is lost when training load is reduced. The difference was that one decreased intensity of training and the other decreased volume. After an initial training period, the groups would decrease their training volume or intensity by one-third or two-thirds. What they found was that when subjects decreased their training intensity long-term, endurance was decreased by 21% in the one-third reduction group and 30% in the two-thirds reduction group. However, when subjects decreased their training volume long-term, endurance remained the same in the one-thirds reduction group and only decreased by 10% in the two-thirds reduction group. What this means is that reducing intensity causes more performance decline than reducing volume. What this would suggest is that if you're looking to decrease your training load during a taper, the best strategy would be to decrease volume and not intensity. And this idea is supported by further research. Going back to this review, they state that a taper is best achieved by maintaining training intensity, reducing training volume, and slightly reducing training frequency. So we have a pretty good idea now that we want to be decreasing training volume and not intensity before a race. But by how much? Again, this is a critical question. Too much volume and you're going to be tired. Too little volume and you might lose more fitness than you want or feel stale. Where does that sweet spot lie? This study on different stepwise tapering strategies tested just that. They had subjects follow a seven-day tapering protocol in which they either reduced volume by 30, 50, or 80% while training intensity was maintained. What they found was that the 50% reduction group saw a significant 5.4% improvement in 20 kilometer time trial performance, while the 30% and 80% group saw no significant difference. Okay, so now we have a better idea of how much we need to decrease that volume. Bringing volume down to about half of what you normally do, seems to yield the best results. This kind of volume reduction was confirmed by this meta analysis on tapering and performance which looked at many studies. They found that the optimal strategy was a two week taper where training volume is decreased by 40 to 60% without any modifications in training intensity or frequency. When taking a look at the literature, this 40 to 60% volume reduction without any reduction in intensity is a pretty common conclusion. What seems to be less agreed upon is the optimal length of the taper. Two weeks is often cited as optimal, but there are some articles that give a wide range, like this one that cited a range of four days to 28 days. That's kind of like somebody asking what your FTP is and then responding, somewhere between 120 and 450 watts. No, see, you messed up by not asking them what their FTP is first, because if you had done that, then there's a simple equation that I've developed from hours of research and testing that you could have easily used. There may be good reasons for this wide range though. Individual variability is certainly one factor at play here. Some people will respond better to a longer taper and some people will respond better to a shorter taper and finding the optimal taper length for you may require experimentation. Another important factor that may determine how long you want a taper for is whether or not you use an overload intervention in the weeks before the taper. Overloading your training with respect to tapering means that instead of going from a normal training load straight into your taper, you actually do more training than usual right before your taper to try to tack on a little bit more fitness right before your event. And this method has actually shown pretty promising results in the literature. For example, this study on a compressed overload and taper, which had subjects either follow a normal 11 day taper or do six days of intensity work followed by a five day taper. What they found was a greater power output at lactate threshold in the group that had done the overload protocol over the control group. This review confirms this stating that an increase in training load of 20 to 30% may be beneficial. But if this strategy is taken, then a longer taper is required. An eight to 14 day taper seems to be optimal in running and cycling. So basically the harder that you train before the taper, the longer the taper needs to be. Makes sense. So to summarize the science, you want to reduce your training volume but maintain your intensity and frequency. And you may also want to do an overload before your taper, but I would proceed with caution on this one. It can be easy to overdo it with an overload and still be tired on race day. This is probably a technique for more experienced riders. If you overload your training, your taper will likely need to be a bit longer, but the optimal taper length varies from person to person and can even vary depending on the importance of your race. For more important races, you're gonna want a longer taper to give yourself the best possible performance for that race. For less important races, you're gonna want a shorter taper because if you've got multiple races throughout the year and you're constantly doing a one to two week taper for all of them, then you're probably not gonna be gaining much fitness throughout the year and in fact, you may even decrease your fitness throughout the season. With that, let's get into some example training week so we can see what an optimal tapering strategy should look like. As I said, your taper should look different depending on how important the race is. So I'll be giving you example weeks for a C, B, and A priority race. C races are your lowest priority races. These may be weekday night training races or charity rides or a local low competition, low stakes weekend race. Now, for some people, these may be your A races. Shoot, there are some people that make chasing Strava segments their A races. Well, obviously, I mean, would you rather race for a pair of 26 inch mountain bike tires and a 20% off coupon for a bike fit that you're probably gonna lose in your car or would you rather race so that a handful of people online will give you a virtual thumbs up? I should have taken up golf or something. That part is up to you, but my point is that C races are mainly done for training purposes and the result is secondary. B races are a bit higher priority. They're not just done for training and you do care about the result that you get at a B race, but they're not your highest priority race on the calendar. And then we have A races. These are your big goals for the season. These are the races that you mark on your calendar at the beginning of the year and say, I need to be in the best shape possible on this day or peaking. You don't wanna have too many of these in a season. Two to four is probably fine, but much more than that and we run into the same problem that I talked about just a minute ago where you're constantly tapering for your A race and not really gaining that much fitness. Let's start first with what your training should look like for a C priority race. Let's say this hypothetical rider, Jordan Sands, typically rides 10 hours per week with a Tuesday and Saturday interval session, a rest day Monday and a recovery ride Friday and the rest zone two endurance, which is a pretty standard training week. On a week that he's got a C priority race on Saturday, the only change he's gonna make is switching out the Saturday interval session with the race and otherwise it's a normal week. Remember, these C priority races are training races, but they'll still be very high in intensity, obviously. So you'll wanna replace one of your high intensity days in the week with this race. I would do this even if the race doesn't fall perfectly on your normal interval day. For example, let's say there's a Wednesday night training race, but you typically do intervals on Tuesday. Instead of doing intervals on Tuesday, I would just do Wednesday's endurance ride that day and then do your intensity on Wednesday during the race. Moving on to the B race week, I would do a sort of mini half week taper. For example, here Jordan would do a normal interval session on Tuesday, his typical Wednesday endurance ride at its usual length or slightly shorter than usual if he feels he needs more of a taper before the weekend and then when we get to Thursday, he'll do a recovery ride and Friday will be an easy ride with a couple of opener efforts thrown in and Saturday race. Openers the day before race do not have to be super complicated and in fact, I would do them mainly based off of feel and ignore power and heart rate, which is not something that you usually hear me say on this channel. A typical set of openers may be a five minute, three minute and one minute effort with full recovery in between at about an eight out of 10 effort level. So definitely giving it some juice but not completely maxed out if that makes sense. And finally, what you probably all clicked on this video for, what should your taper look like for that big race on the calendar, the A race? Let's say that Jordan decides to start his taper with a bit of an overload, two weeks out from the race where he did back to back interval days and rode a bit longer than normal on those days. He would then go into a couple days of active recovery before another very high intensity interval session on Saturday, a week out from the race and a shorter than usual endurance ride on Sunday. Perhaps this would be a good time to point out that when I said maintain intensity earlier in the video, that doesn't mean that every day should be really hard, far from it actually. On the days that you are going hard, however, you want the intensity to be very high, which should get easier and easier to achieve as the taper progresses with the reduced training load. Bursty workouts like 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off and VO2 max intervals are great during the taper week. Now that we're into the actual race week itself, we still have a rest day Monday and an intensity day Tuesday. What's important to note about this session is that you're doing less intervals than you would normally do. For example, Jordan usually does five VO2 max intervals, but for this session, he'll just do three. And that way, he's not completely spent at the end of the workout, which you'll want to avoid during race week. Wednesday is a short ride at the low end of zone two endurance pace and Thursday is a short recovery ride before the same opener workout on Friday and finally race day on Saturday. Now let's say that Jordan didn't do an overload before his taper. His taper wouldn't need to be quite as long and I've found that for most people doing a full two week taper in this situation is a bit overkill. Instead, the week two weeks out from the race would look pretty similar to normal with the exception that you may want to do less volume than normal, that weekend especially on the Sunday ride. The week leading into the race would look the same. Some other important things to keep in mind, practicing on the course the week before the race is highly recommended. If you can do that opener workout the day before the race on a hard section of the course, then that's perfect. Even if it doesn't match perfectly with the interval length. Don't do anything new on race week. Don't try any new or weird food that you haven't tried before. Don't change your bike fit two days before the race. Don't take any supplements that you haven't taken before and don't take anything during the race that you haven't already tried in training. Race week is not the time for experimenting. You never know how your body will react to something. So leave the experimentation for a normal training week. Finally, as I said before tapering can be individual. Some people will do better on a two week taper. Some people better on one. Some people will do better with an overload and some people without. And some people need more volume and some people need less volume. Take note of what works and doesn't work for you in your taper so you can use or avoid those methods in the future. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like. Subscribe for more science based cycling content just like this and share this video with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.