As athletes, coaches and sports scientists throughout the world continue to push human adaptation and training loads to ever-expanding limits with a view to stimulating peak performance, there is a growing emphasis on the importance of ‘the taper’ – a marked reduction in training load in the days before competition which is thought to have the paradoxical effect of optimising performance.

Despite its crucial importance, coaches and athletes have tended to rely on a trial and error approach to tapering, largely because of the paucity of scientific evidence for the effectiveness of the various régimes employed.

However, that evidence has begun to accumulate in a useful way, and a pair of Spanish researchers have now made it even more useful by reviewing and analysing the available evidence and drawing some practical conclusions from it.

What exactly is a taper? According to Inigo Mujika and Sabino Madilla, who have themselves been responsible for much of the available research, it has been recently redefined as: ‘a progressive nonlinear reduction of the training load during a variable period of time, in an attempt to reduce the physiological and psychological stress of daily training and optimise sports performance’.

Are these hypothetical benefits borne out in practice? The evidence suggests that they are, and Mujika and Madilla cite a range of observed beneficial effects, including: changes in the balance of key hormones and blood content; reduced perception of effort, mood disturbance and fatigue; increased vigour and improved quality of sleep.

The researchers go on to examine the evidence relating to various aspects of the taper, including training intensity, volume and frequency, duration and type of taper and expected performance improvements. Their key conclusions are as follows:

1. Aim

The primary aim of the taper should be to minimise accumulated fatigue rather than to attain additional physiological adaptations or fitness gains. This goal should be achieved without compromising previously acquired adaptations and fitness level;

2. Training intensity

This is the one aspect of training that should not be reduced. The maintenance of training intensity (ie quality) is necessary to avoid detraining, as long as reductions in other training variables allows for sufficient recovery to optimise performance;

3. Training volume

This, on the other hand, can be slashed with impunity, since reductions as high as 60-90% appear to induce positive physiological psychological and performance responses in highly trained athletes;

4. Training frequency

High training frequencies (at least 80% of pre-taper values) seem to be necessary to avoid detraining and/or ‘loss of feel’ in highly-trained athletes – especially in the more ‘technique-dependent’ sports like swimming. On the other hand, training-induced adaptations can be readily maintained with very low training frequencies (30-50% of pre-taper values) in moderately trained individuals;

5. Duration of taper

Assessing the optimum duration of a pre-competition taper is one of the most difficult challenges for coaches and sports scientists, since positive physiological and performance adaptations have been observed in response to tapers lasting anything between four and 28 days. The researchers conclude that taper 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;

6. Type of taper

Four different types of taper have been described and used:

• Linear taper, in which training load is reduced progressively in linear fashion;
• Exponential taper (slow decay), with a relatively slow non-linear decline in load;
• Exponential taper (fast decay), in which the rate of decline is faster;
• Step taper – a non-progressive standardised reduction of training load.

Of these, progressive non-linear techniques seem to have a more pronounced positive impact on performance than step-taper strategies.

7. Expected performance improvements

While tapering strategies are usually effective at improving performance, they cannot be expected to work miracles. A realistic performance goal for the final taper should be a competition performance improvement of about 3% (usual range 0.5-6%).

Med Sci Sports Exerc, vol 35, no 7, pp 1182-1187, 2003

tapering