Tapering – 80/20 Endurance

The era of big data has arrived in sports science research, and I couldn’t be happier. For a long time I was skeptical about sports science as a source of useful information about how to train effectively as an endurance athlete. The typical study was just too limited in scope and too simplified in comparison to the real world for me as a coach to put much stock in its findings. Even basic truths like the importance of training at high volume to maximize endurance fitness had virtually zero support in the scientific literature because it was almost impossible to prove or disprove within the constraints of a typical sports science study.

But the advent of big data has changed all that. Now scientists can answer specific training questions with a high degree of confidence by collecting training data from tens of thousands of athletes and teasing out correlations between training inputs and fitness and performance outputs.

The latest example is a study on tapering in marathon training that was conduction by Barry Smyth and Aonghus Lawlor at University College Dublin and published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living. Smyth and Lawlor analyzed data from the devices of more than 158,000 runners in the final weeks of marathon training, focusing on 1) how long their taper period was (i.e., how many weeks out from race day their training volume began to decline), 2) how disciplined their taper was (i.e., how consistently their training volume decreased throughout it), and 3) how well they performed in the marathon relative to their best 10K time. Here are the main findings:

A more disciplined taper (i.e., consistent decline in volume) was the strongest predictor of better marathon performance. Once runners began to taper, they were better off continuing to taper.
Runners who tapered for three weeks tended to perform better than runners who tapered for two weeks or less. Extending the taper to four weeks resulted in no additional gains.
Runners who trained at higher volumes prior to tapering tended to taper longer and to execute more disciplined tapers.
A majority of the runners (64 percent) tapered for two weeks or less and in an undisciplined way.

The authors concluded, “An important practical implication of this work is that there could be an opportunity for many runners to improve their relative performance by implementing a more disciplined form of taper. This is likely to be of considerable interest to recreational marathoners and coaches.”

They’re certainly right on that last point. As a coach to many marathon runners, I take considerable interest in these findings. But I’m not exactly sure yet what to do with them. I’ve always believed that the duration of a taper should be determined by how hard the athlete trains before the taper, and that most recreational runners don’t train hard enough to require a long taper. In this study, appropriately, high-volume runners were found to have engaged in the longest tapers, but even lower-volume runners tended to gain a slight benefit from a three-week taper versus a shorter one. The impact of a disciplined taper was greater than that of a lengthier taper, however, and like any coach with half a brain I always prescribe disciplined tapers, so that won’t change.

Come to think of it, I don’t know if anything will change. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single athlete I’ve ever coached who underperformed in a marathon as a consequence of feeling under-tapered going into the race. As they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. On the other hand, my curiosity is piqued, so I will probably give one of my athletes an opportunity to experiment with a slightly longer marathon taper in the near future. If it doesn’t work, we can both blame Barry Smyth and Aonghus Lawlor.

As a final note, although this study focused on marathon tapering, its most striking finding had to do with marathon pacing. Specifically, female runners were found to pace their marathons far more skillfully than male runners, who on average added 4.49 minutes to their finish times by starting too aggressively and hitting the wall. For me, this finding points to the need for a comprehensive guide to developing pacing skill. Stay tuned.

Recently one of my custom training plan clients emailed me with a question. He was three weeks out from the marathon he’d hired me to prepare him for and was somewhat alarmed to see that I had scheduled a 20-mile run featuring 16 miles at his goal marathon pace at the end of the current week. His question was, in essence: Is two weeks enough time to recover from such a big workout?

In reply, I told my client that if he couldn’t recover from such a big workout in less than two weeks, he had greater problems than a coach who doesn’t know how to plan a proper pre-race taper! A cheeky answer, I know, but I receive versions of this same question so often that my patience is wearing thin. That’s why I’m writing this article, in which I hope to dispel the widely held notion that it’s necessary to cut way back on training for a long time before an important race.

As chance would have it, the email exchange I just described happened around the same time a relevant new study appeared in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine in Sports. Authored by Bent Rønnestad of Inland Norway University and Olav Vikmoen of the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, the study looked at the effects of two different tapering protocols on “physiological and psychological variables of endurance performance” in elite cyclists.

Nine athletes completed a traditional 11-day taper that maintained the normal frequency of high-intensity interval training and reduced overall training volume, while eight others did six days of stepped-up “overload training” followed by a compressed five-day taper. Testing was conducted at three points: immediately before the 11-day interventions, again on Day 7, and once more on Day 11. Cyclists in the compressed taper group exhibited significantly greater improvements in peak oxygen consumption (4 percent vs. 0.8 percent) and one-minute peak power output (5 percent vs. 0.9) and a slightly greater improvement in power output at lactate threshold intensity. In short, the compressed taper worked better than the traditional one.

This study was actually a follow-up to a small pilot study done two years before by a research team that included the same duo plus two other scientists. And when I say “small” I mean small: It was an individual case study involving an elite male cross-country mountain biker. During a two-week interval between World Cup races, this athlete underwent seven days of overload training followed by a five-day taper. Both objective and subjective measurements were taken throughout. As expected, the cyclist felt like crap and exhibited compromised physiology on Day 1 of tapering, but by Day 4 he reported feeling good and his numbers were well above baseline. And two days after that he felt like Superman.

This compressed tapering protocol was developed specifically for use by endurance athletes like mountain bike racers on the World Cup circuit with tight competition schedules. It’s simply impractical for these athletes to follow a traditional protocol, and these two studies show they can have their cake and eat it too—that is, work hard enough to stay fit and recover sufficiently to race on peak form—by stacking short periods of overload training with compressed tapers. But what the same experiments also indicate, more broadly, is that it just doesn’t take very long to recover from peak training loads.

Real-world evidence supports these findings. While most elite endurance athletes practice some version of the traditional tapering protocol, others have found success with a compressed taper. Triathlon legend Dave Scott, for example, didn’t lighten up his training until three days before the Ironman World Championship, and that didn’t stop him from winning it six times in the 1980s!

When I try to make the case for short tapers with individual athletes like the custom training plan client who emailed me about his big marathon-pace run, I often ask them the following question: “How do you typically feel and perform when you’re in a period of heavy training and you do a challenging workout that is preceded by two very light days?” The answer is always the same: They tend to feel good and perform well. So, then, I point out (springing the trap), if two easy days during a period of heavy training usually suffice to make you feel and perform well in a hard workout, how much more time do you really need to taper down for a race?

To be clear, I’m not trying to argue for a two-day taper before an event such as a marathon or an Ironman triathlon. My point, simply, is that the optimal pre-race taper is not as long as many athletes seem to think. So, if you ever hire me to create a custom training plan for you and the last big workouts seem dangerously close to race day, keep those worries to yourself and do as I tell you. You won’t regret it!

If I could clone myself a few times for the sake of taking different paths in life, I would definitely dedicate one of my clones to the pursuit of sports science. This being impossible with current technology, I choose instead to live vicariously through the individual sports scientists who are tackling the questions I would be most interested in tackling if I had my own lab.

One such question (or line of questioning, more accurately) is this: If you could do only one

thing right in your training as an endurance athlete, what should it be? In other words, what is the single most beneficial training practice you could employ as an endurance athlete seeking improved performance? And if you were already doing this one thing, what then is the next most impactful method you could incorporate?

If we were to pursue this line of questioning all the way through to the end, we would end up with a sort of hierarchy of endurance training needs. How useful that would be! Well, guess what? This hierarchy already exists, created by one of my very favorite sports scientists, Stephen Seiler, who drew upon his encyclopedic knowledge of research on endurance training practices to perform the exercise I just described. With a nod to Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of psychological needs, Seiler’s Hierarchy of Endurance Training Needs ranks eight fundamental training practices in order of proven impact. If there’s a more helpful tool for understanding the big picture of endurance training, I haven’t seen it. So, let’s go through the hierarchy (see Seiler’s own graphical summary at the end of this post):

1. Total Frequency/Volume of Training

According to Seiler, the single most beneficial thing you can do to improve your performance in endurance racing is to train a lot. The fine print is that in training a lot, you must be sure not to train too much, and you can train more without training too much if you train at low intensity, so what Seiler really means here is that the single most beneficial thing you can do to improve your performance in endurance racing is do a lot of low-intensity training.

2. High-Intensity Training

Although doing a lot of training exclusively at low intensity will make you fitter than doing a small amount of any other kind of training, you will get fitter still if you combine a little high-intensity training with a lot of low-intensity training. Seiler rates this fact as “well established” in the scientific literature.

3. Training Intensity Distribution

Seiler made a name for himself by discovering the 80/20 Rule of endurance training, which posits that endurance athletes improve the most when they do roughly 80 percent of their training at low intensity and the remaining 20 percent (give or take) at moderate to high intensity. So, the next most impactful thing you can do in your endurance training—if you’re already doing a lot of low-intensity training and a little high-intensity training—is to fine-tune the balance of intensities to bring your training in line with the 80/20 Rule.

Let me add here that applying the 80/20 Rule is usually the first change that I make to the training of the athletes I coach. The reason is that the average recreational endurance athlete does close to 50 percent of his or her training at moderate intensity—way too much. Training more won’t help an athlete who is caught in the moderate-intensity rut because it only exacerbates an existing problem. There is much more to be gained from redistributing the training he or she is already doing and then taking advantage of the reduced stress and fatigue levels resulting from this shift to train more.

4. General Periodization Details (Annual)

Periodization refers to the practice of evolving one’s training over the course of the year in specific ways intended to cause fitness to continually increase. Seiler rates this practice as “likely overrated.” By this I don’t think he means that training shouldn’t evolve over the course of the year but rather that the details don’t matter much. If that’s the case, then I agree wholeheartedly. What does matter is that 1) the overall training workload (which is a function of both the volume and the intensity of training) increase and 2) your most challenging race-specific workouts come later on, when your fitness is near peak levels and it’s getting close to time to race. But the relevant research has shown that within these broad parameters, different periodization practices yield similar results. In other words, where periodization is concerned, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

5. Sports-Specific and Micro-Periodization Schemes

According to Seiler, the particular ways in which endurance athletes chose to sequence workouts from day to day and week to week has a “likely modest” effect on fitness. In other words, it doesn’t matter too much whether you schedule recovery weeks every third week or every fourth week. Of course, it’s vitally important that you balance hard work and rest/recovery in such a way that your body neither accumulates fatigue over extended periods nor detrains between challenging training stimuli, but as with macro-periodization, there’s more than one way to achieve this balance.

6. Training-Stimuli Enhancement

“Training stimuli enhancement” refers to practices such as training at high altitude and training in a glycogen depleted state. Seiler believes that such things are worth doing but that the effects are “individual and condition specific.”

7. Pacing Training

Fitness is not the only determinant of race performance. To get the most benefit from any level of fitness in competition, an athlete must pace himself or herself effectively, and this objective is aided by practicing pacing in training, which may also serve to stimulate pace-specific fitness adaptations. Seiler rates this practice as “potentially decisive if everything else is done right.”

8. Training Taper

Although your fitness level won’t change much in the last week or two before a race, no matter what you do, what you do in the last week or two before a race can have a big impact on how you perform nevertheless. Tapering is the art (Stephen Seiler might say science) of altering your training prior to competition to ensure that you’re rested—but not too rested—and physiologically primed for a maximal effort. Science has shown clearly, for example, that endurance athletes race better when they include high-intensity work in their taper than when they do everything at low intensity. Seiler rates tapering as “potentially decisive if you have one isolated competition. . . and everything else is done right.”

Learn more here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stephen_Seiler/publication/310725768_Seiler%27s_Hierarchy_of_Endurance_Training_Needs/links/583590c208ae004f74cc51f5/Seilers-Hierarchy-of-Endurance-Training-Needs.pdf