Drop Dead Taper

Fort, how about a 2-week taper that goes like this: Week 1: drop all cross-training. Keep your swimming yardage up, but make your fast swims REALLY fast and your slow swims slower and technique-oriented. Make sure you do (or continue to do ) starts, turns and breakouts at true race speed. Week 2: reduce swimming yardage and do fewer sprints. Do no more than a meet warmup the last day or two. (By the way, I also start feeling like crap after 7-10 days of taper, so I would be inclined towards either a "mini" 3-day taper or a full 3 weeks. But everyone responds differently.) And getting plenty of sleep -- maybe throw in a massage or two -- is the best PED out there.

Fort, how about a 2-week taper that goes like this: Week 1: drop all cross-training. Keep your swimming yardage up, but make your fast swims REALLY fast and your slow swims slower and technique-oriented. Make sure you do (or continue to do ) starts, turns and breakouts at true race speed. Week 2: reduce swimming yardage and do fewer sprints. Do no more than a meet warmup the last day or two. (By the way, I also start feeling like crap after 7-10 days of taper, so I would be inclined towards either a "mini" 3-day taper or a full 3 weeks. But everyone responds differently.) And getting plenty of sleep -- maybe throw in a massage or two -- is the best PED out there. Hmmm .... maybe I'll try this. So no pace work during week one? I was just wondering about the drop dead as an alternative. Maybe I'll try it, just for fun, before another meet. Also, I really think women have to taper less than men. Smaller, less muscle mass etc. Although I do appear to have more muscle mass than Geekity.

I'm going to ignore the comment concerning my lack of muscles. I think I'll try this 3 day drop dead thing before my next meet as well and see how it works out. Does that literally mean you do absolutely nothing for three days before? I don't know if I can do that, to be honest.

maybe I'll make it one also swim in as many meets as you can but also have a few practices that are like a meet. Get in, do a meet warm up, rest 10 minutes, hop up and race your event for time then swim down then do it again develop the ability to swim very fast 2, 3 or 4 times each day for 3 days in a row Great post, Ande! I think this could be a new SFF tip. I do fret about longer tapers. Sometimes it sucks to train alone and go only on instinct.

I'm going to ignore the comment concerning my lack of muscles. I think I'll try this 3 day drop dead thing before my next meet as well and see how it works out. Does that literally mean you do absolutely nothing for three days before? I don't know if I can do that, to be honest. Thats the taper Laura has used the last two nationals....but the reality is she actually starts two weeks out by keeping yardage the same but increasing the amount of rest on intervals. Literally the last 3 days she swims till she warms up and gets out. The taper Chris describes is similar to what I use...but I stop dryland 3 weeks out. I also stop doing starts two weeks out (and anything else that taxes my legs...even walking up stairs). Still the biggest key tapering is your mindset...especially on a longer taper when you hit that wall about a week into it and feel like crap...so many people blow right then as they are convinced they are out of shape and fading. Ande mentioned Eddie Reece usuaing the analogy of "banking" your trianing all season and "arriving" at a taper...and I 100% agree...this is not a hit or miss thing and you MUST learn to trust your body....if you been training somehwat consistently always error on the side of more rest vs. less.

Crash tapers has worked for my swimmers often. But as a middle taper 1,5-2 months before a major meet. And I would never crash taper for 7 days. Only 3-4 days. Its a great way to swim well for a meet that is fairly important but not the championships. It also give my swimmers the opportunity to get race experience at close to best times. I would have a crash taper in the end of a 6 week cycle with 2 cycles left before the major competition. To advise you much on how to taper it would be good to get a bit more info on how you train. How a swimmer taper have to based on: - how he train - how he is build (man/woman, height, muscle mass, age...) - how he is mentally - and not least what experience he have from other tapers. One great coach once took aside at a national championship when I was a young coach and asked me what my team had been doing the last two weeks. I explained with the result of him taking a deep breathe and saying "come, lets go have a beer" That evening I learned a lot. It can be cooked down to: - last 10 days before a major competition: Relax and have fun. If in doubt swim LESS. I have worked after that since and several times other coaches have come to me and asked how I trim my swimmers to swim so well at the right time. As some one else has mentioned its also important to stay happy. When preparing for a competition focus on what you are good at. Do the things that make you feel good. Remember all the good practices and races you have done. Visualize how you are going to swim fast and maybe even beat swimmers you never thought before you would beat. In the end if you go the meet feeling confident the body will perform more or less no matter what taper you did! In general: my experience with masters is that if you swim less that 20 k per week you should taper by swimming less intensity and keep the millage up. Otherwise it can be difficult to keep the feeling with and the balance in the water. Also have in mind what kind of competition you are going to swim. Are you going to swim 2 sessions per day for 2-4 days? Then calculate how much you will be swimming all included. Warm ups, races, swim downs. You want to keep you training - also in taper - up to a level so the meet will not become a hard training camp for you. Have fun Mads - ReachELITE

I would think at this point in the season, you would only rest before, not a true taper.

I agree with the 3 day mini taper. I recently had a meet and arrived feeling sore and tired after attempting some swims for time for the week leading up to meet day. I basically cut the yardage in half for 7 days and did a swim for time each day. Trying to get a feel for race pace. The intensity of each short workout was in my opinion breaking me down. I was physically spent by the end of the week. I did OK, but not near where I wanted to be. A 3 day rest would have been the better way to go.

Somewhat recent work by Inigo Mujika has compelling evidence showing that an exponential taper that drops by 35 to 55% each day is better than a simple drop taper or linear decrease in yardage taper. These studies were probably published Maglischo finished his manuscript for hit latest book. You can check pubmed for his name to pull up the abstracts. As for the length of taper, a fellow named Phil Skiba and I have three seasons of modeling data showing that the optimum length of taper for adult triathletes is *usually* 3 or 4 days but I have seen outliers from as little as 1 day to as much as 8 days. The "typical" training load of these athletes is usually 3 hours of actual swimming per week. (Yes, this confirms that most triathletes don't care about swimming, but of course there are some who do:-) ) This is opposed to the data from swimmers averaging 50k per week that showed optimal taper lengths of ~ 21 days. (Hellard et al, 1996) If I were taking a stab, I'd say 6 to 8 day exponential taper would be the way to go. Drop the amount of yards by 50% every workout, keep the same frequency of working out, keep some fast swimming in the workouts as well in order not to lose your feel or stroke in the water. You can actually work these things out for yourself with 8 performance tests and a training log and know for yourself exactly how long your taper should be. If you'd like to know how to do it, send me an email off list. Kevin, I think what you are describing makes a lot of sense for a triathlete...but am very skeptical that this forumla will work for swimming specific races. Even a sprint triathlon is at least 4x longer than our longest distance (1650/1500)...so coming down from a much heavier training regime a triathlete would be far more concerned with any loss of conditioning from resting as much as we typically do. To me what your describing for a triathlete would be similar to a swimmer that does a 3 day taper as we've been describing.

I have this image that, when you step on the block, you should be bursting with energy, like a frisky race horse in the stall before the race. Of course, you need to harness that energy intelligently with a good race strategy. Like that one. The Seabiscuit strategy.