How to Use Tapering

It’s good to know that a method like tapering exists, but knowing exactly how to use it to step up your progress is even better! The FizzUp trainer is here to help you revamp your training cycles to keep your body evolving.

1 | HOW TAPERING WORKS

Tapering is a recovery period during which you reduce your training volume for a certain number of days relative to the time you were training or the time you will train in the future.

Once you know when you’ll be competing or taking a fitness test, the next step is to create a workout schedule that gets you to your peak fitness. Your workouts need to be designed to make you progress using several stages, depending on your goal. To put it simply, you’ll be going from a high volume and low intensity to a low volume and higher intensity.

Tapering comes after a specific training phase when you use higher-intensity exercises that are very similar to what you’ll be doing during a competition.

As you taper, you reduce the training volume by 30 to 60% to maximize the effects of recovery on your performance. The training volume can be suddenly or gradually reduced.

On the other hand, you need to keep the same training intensity and the number of workouts you do should also be about the same, although your bouts of physical effort are shorter. The goal behind keeping the same intensity is to give yourself a constant training stimulus, whereas a drastic decrease in volume will aid in recovery.

2 | HOW LONG TAPERING TAKES

It depends on your sport, but tapering comes after an 8 to 10-week training cycle preparing you for a specific competition or test. It can last for three days to three weeks depending on the training load you’ve been using and your own level of fatigue.

On average, two weeks of tapering is recommended because it makes supercompensation easier to achieve. But no matter how long you choose to taper, you have to reduce your training volume, which will boost your technical work and mental preparation.

There are at least three factors that come into play when you’re trying to decide how long to taper for, depending on your goal:

• Volume: The longer the competition is or the longer you have to run, the longer your tapering needs to last so that you can reach your peak fitness. For instance, a 5 km race for a runner who regularly goes on 10 km runs for training needs little to no recovery, whereas for a marathon, they’d need two weeks of tapering for the most part.
• Intensity: If an athlete has been using a workload for an extend period of time and needs time to recover from it. When they’ve been training like this for several months, tapering gives them an excuse to remove this heavy workload from their routine.
• Importance: Sometimes a competition can be a workout in and of itself and doesn’t require any recovery ahead of time. But if this competition is extremely important to you, you need to give yourself enough time to completely recover ahead of time.

It’s important to remember that you can only maintain a maximum level of physical fitness for a short period of time before it starts to decline. If you try to keep it up, you can become mentally exhausted and put yourself at a higher risk of injury.

3 | IS TAPERING A PART OF FIZZUP?

By now you know that strategically using tapering can help you regain your strength and boost your athletic performance. That’s why FizzUp includes this essential method in your training cycles to guarantee that you’re constantly progressing toward your fitness goals. Here are the key points to remember about tapering:

• Make sure your tapering strategy works for you as an individual and lasts between 1 and 4 weeks, or 8 to 14 days in most cases.
• Gradually reduce your training volume by up to 40 to 60% and your training frequency by 20%.
• Remember to keep the training intensity at moderate to high to keep your body from detraining.
• Recover and do what you need to avoid injury.
• Create strategies to keep your nutrition and hydration in check.
• Listen to your body and give it enough time to recover depending on your level of fatigue.

Here at FizzUp, our product development team has worked to boost your progress potential by creating training cycles with these many factors and the importance of recovery in mind. Every FizzUp training cycle includes a tapering period so that you achieve supercompensation during your level’s last evaluation, which is why the workouts just before the last evaluation are easier and the sequence of levels use distinctly different levels of intensity.

All of our training protocols are designed to bring you a variety of training volumes and intensities so that they have the same effect as general adaptation syndrome with the least amount of physical effort required to keep you from detraining. And to top it all off, the FizzUp trainer is even there to guide you beyond your workouts with Stretching circuits* and Nutrition*, two elements that are critical for healthy recovery and results.

It’s no secret that with FizzUp, everything we do revolves around progress… YOUR progress.

With this overview of how to use tapering, now you can apply it to your own training strategy and know why we use it in our training cycles. Train hard, win hard with the right technique from the FizzUp trainer!

*FizzUp PRO feature