tapering training??

ozzy1000_0
ozzy1000_0 Posts: 144
hi all,
I'm training for my first century cycle ride on the 26th of june. I've been using the trianing loadplug in for sporttracks...
i've been beasting myself for the last few weeks and accumulating some healthy 'trimp' scores... and i'm pretty bloody knackered at the moment!!... my calculated "taper date" is coming up on the 16th.. can anyone advise me on what to do after this? i'm pretty new to training and i was thinking of just doing maybe acouple of 1 hr easy turbo sessions after the taper date.. just aerobic type stuff to maintian my fittnes... i'm aware that i don't want to be accumulating fatigue/ATL after this date, but ten days without any real excercising seems quite along time??

anny advice on how to approach this is very welcome,

cheers,Owain

Comments

  • 95+% of riders don't need to taper, they simply don' train hard enough for long enough to warrant it.

    I can't tell from what you've said whether you are in that 5% who do, but if you are only talking about having gone hard for a few weeks (as opposed to say 4-6 months of consistent hard progressive overload) then I suspect not.

    Just make the final few days before race a bit easier, maybe a day off two days out, other than that, better to keep working on improving fitness and keeping training loads up, since that's far more important.

    Keep in mind that even for athletes that would benefit from a taper, it typically only provides a 1-3% improvement in power and so the possible benefit probably doesn't outweigh the risk of losing fitness from cutting training too early, especially if your chronic training loads are not that high.
  • Pokerface
    Pokerface Posts: 7,960
    Plus - would anyone actually do a 10 day taper? :shock:


    I've done a couple of tapers of 4-5 days max and it helped. But I was looking for that extra 1%. 10 days and I would have gone stale!
  • Pokerface wrote:
    Plus - would anyone actually do a 10 day taper?
    Yes, under the right circumstances a taper can take 2 weeks. But one might be starting with a CTL in the 130-150 TSS/day range.