You’ve been training all season and now you’re getting to the time where it really matters. Race day is coming up and you know that you need to taper everybody talks about you gotta taper, you gotta taper. What the hell is this taper? What does it do? Well, I’m Jesse Funk and on today’s episode of Runner’s High, we’re going to talk about how taper actually improves your performance.
So, first off, if you don’t know all about the phases of training, you don’t know about periodization, hit that subscribe button, stick around me on the channel. I actually have a whole miniseries talking about periodization, each phase and why it’s important.
But in this video, in particular, let’s talk about taper. What does taper do for you? How? Why does it work and the method that gets you to your maximum gains. So, when we’re talking about taper, we are talking about the time when you basically finished trying to put in any kind of performance, any kind of effort, that’s going to improve your fitness by breaking you down. When we get to taper, this is the time when we start cutting back our mileage.
Now, a lot of people try different things with taper. But the generally accepted idea is to lower your mileage and stay high with intensity. Because if you just drop everything off, you don’t do any intensity, often people feel sluggish when it comes to race day. So, the whole point of that taper is to overcompensate on our rest so that we can perform at a higher level.
And it does that through giving our body more time to recover by reducing our volume and keeping intensity high so that we have the maximum firing of our muscles so we can race a high level once our body overcompensates for that time that we spent resting, it can repair all the damage that we’ve done to it and make us ready to race at a higher level than we’ve been able to before.
If you have any questions for me, you want to know more about running, the intricacies of running the little things that you’re wondering about, leave them in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you. And I’ll see you next time on the next episode of Runner’s High.