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Taper Thoughts.
I received a really good question this morning from Renaud and thought this would be worth sharing with everyone.
I don’t know if this happens to anyone else, but it certainly happens to me. Some of my best sessions, “breakthrough sessions” (That one is for you Glenn ;-) come off the back end of the heaviest periods of training. You would think fatigue would not allow this to occur.
Quite often you hear of athletes doing PB’s over OLY’s and HIM’s around 5-7 weeks out from the IM event when they are right in the middle of their heaviest training loads.
So the question is do we need to taper? If so, by how much? To direct this a little more I would be curious to hear David Holderbach’s thoughts on this. As you know he comes from an Elite sporting background and David, do typical age group athletes training programs warrant a 3-4 week taper when you compare some of the heaviest training loads you used to undertake during your career. I can remember some of the training weeks and blocks you used to talk about and they would scare the bee-jesus out of me.
Sometimes I doubt that will truly develop enough overload and fatigue in order to have a 3-4 week taper to clear out that fatigue. I was speaking to Tom, an ex pro cyclist from Holland about this on the weekend and he said they would never taper. They would just train from event to event and compete almost on a weekly basis for a whole season. He was a one day classic rider.
As age group athletes our primary limiter is generally time and it makes me think that due to work, family etc we are forced to rest quite a bit between training sessions and we just don’t have the time to do those big tough, digging deep sessions on a regular basis. So it makes me wonder if we truly are capable to developing the levels of fatigue that induce the big adaptations that then consequently require a taper.
Maybe age group athletes are capable of much shorter tapers???
Thoughts everyone
Fluro
Hi Paul,
I have one concern about preparation and RI days or weeks before a race.
Fact is that I have always been performing very well on a race when
-I have been training a lot during the week (for example this sunday I did a run race after a 19hours week training) and I felt very well and easy during the race
-I have been doing a long ride the day before the race (like during half IM last june with David)
-I did not take any particular rest during the week and even some extra sport ( yes it is what you think it is ! ) the night before.
-and also yesterday before going to the race, I did one hour easy wind trainer.
All this make me wonder if it is a good thing to rest before a race and how should I manage it. May be I should do the final preparation of my IM differently. Instead of resting and trying to over-compensate. I am currently dis-oriented by these facts. It is not the matter today for my preparation but it will be in 15 weeks from now.
Strange feeling, isn't it ?
Renaud
I received a really good question this morning from Renaud and thought this would be worth sharing with everyone.
I don’t know if this happens to anyone else, but it certainly happens to me. Some of my best sessions, “breakthrough sessions” (That one is for you Glenn ;-) come off the back end of the heaviest periods of training. You would think fatigue would not allow this to occur.
Quite often you hear of athletes doing PB’s over OLY’s and HIM’s around 5-7 weeks out from the IM event when they are right in the middle of their heaviest training loads.
So the question is do we need to taper? If so, by how much? To direct this a little more I would be curious to hear David Holderbach’s thoughts on this. As you know he comes from an Elite sporting background and David, do typical age group athletes training programs warrant a 3-4 week taper when you compare some of the heaviest training loads you used to undertake during your career. I can remember some of the training weeks and blocks you used to talk about and they would scare the bee-jesus out of me.
Sometimes I doubt that will truly develop enough overload and fatigue in order to have a 3-4 week taper to clear out that fatigue. I was speaking to Tom, an ex pro cyclist from Holland about this on the weekend and he said they would never taper. They would just train from event to event and compete almost on a weekly basis for a whole season. He was a one day classic rider.
As age group athletes our primary limiter is generally time and it makes me think that due to work, family etc we are forced to rest quite a bit between training sessions and we just don’t have the time to do those big tough, digging deep sessions on a regular basis. So it makes me wonder if we truly are capable to developing the levels of fatigue that induce the big adaptations that then consequently require a taper.
Maybe age group athletes are capable of much shorter tapers???
Thoughts everyone
Fluro
Hi Paul,
I have one concern about preparation and RI days or weeks before a race.
Fact is that I have always been performing very well on a race when
-I have been training a lot during the week (for example this sunday I did a run race after a 19hours week training) and I felt very well and easy during the race
-I have been doing a long ride the day before the race (like during half IM last june with David)
-I did not take any particular rest during the week and even some extra sport ( yes it is what you think it is ! ) the night before.
-and also yesterday before going to the race, I did one hour easy wind trainer.
All this make me wonder if it is a good thing to rest before a race and how should I manage it. May be I should do the final preparation of my IM differently. Instead of resting and trying to over-compensate. I am currently dis-oriented by these facts. It is not the matter today for my preparation but it will be in 15 weeks from now.
Strange feeling, isn't it ?
Renaud
