After six months of incredibly hard work, one would think the last week or so leading up to that big race you’ve been aiming for would be relatively straightforward. The go-to quote for coaches in this situation, “The hay is in the barn,” implies that it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what to do. However, nothing gives coaches or runners more fright than planning the last bit of training affectionately known as the taper. The stories of sub-par races with the body being completely out of whack on race day, despite great training for several months, are endless. So why does this small segment of training matter so much and cause all this trouble?
The answer to our peaking troubles should be fairly straightforward if we look at what the best coaches and the relevant scientific research recommend. As you may already know, it turns out that the recommendations by so-called experts only serve to muddle the picture even more.
The scientific view on an optimal peak can be summed up by recent research. After analyzing a variety of different studies on peaking for endurance athletes, it was concluded that the best method was to maintain or slightly increase training intensity, focus the key workouts on faster paces and reduce volume by 60-plus percent. Or, simply put, it’s a dramatic change in training that gets rid of most of the mileage; we’ll call this high intensity and low-volume approach the dramatic taper.
On the other hand, many elite coaches prefer a much more moderate taper, opting not to change much at all. Chris Puppione, coach of 2010 world indoor finalist Tim Bayley, has a philosophy that he calls the “dance-with-the-girl-you-brought” approach. Put simply, “Whatever has been working for you, let it keep working for you … do not get too far from your strengths in training.” Additionally, Puppione recommends only a 10 percent drop in volume, cautioning that when the aerobic stimulus is removed, “it only leads to staleness and fatigue.”
Coach Greg McMillan subscribes to many of the same beliefs. For 5K and 10K athletes, his typical plan includes a 25 percent drop in volume over two weeks. For harder workouts, McMillan recommends doing some race pace work in conjunction with a workout that focuses on your strengths. For example, if you are endurance orientated, focus on slightly slower work such as threshold runs, but if you are speed orientated, include some faster-than-race-pace work. Ultimately, he says, “The most important part of peaking is psychology. You want to give athletes workouts that make them feel good.” Given the dramatic differences in views on peaking, what’s an athlete to do?
Why do coaches and scientists disagree?
Coaches and runners deal with individuals, while scientists deal with averages. As our elite coaches suggest, individualizing the taper is of the utmost importance. One way to conceptualize this is by thinking in terms of what makes up our muscles. As you may already be aware, human muscles consist of several different types of muscle fibers, which are broadly classified as slow-twitch (ST) or fast-twitch (FT) fibers. In general, the runners who are good at short and fast races have more FT fibers while the ultramarathoners have predominately ST fibers. Given our different mixture in the muscles, it makes sense why so many different peaking methods are recommended and why top coaches give different athletes different workouts. Even if they are training for the same event, our ST-laden ultrarunner is going to respond differently to a peak than our FT-heavy middle-distance runner.
The second factor, and perhaps most important, is that studies don’t deal with psychology. As runners, we’re accustomed to a routine of running a certain amount of days and miles per week. When we dramatically diverge from this, we are taken out of our comfort zone. As McMillan says, “You are used to running at a frequent interval, and when you reduce that, it takes you completely out of your ball game.” What is clear is that the goal of a peak is to reduce training just enough so that fatigue dissipates, but confidence and aerobic abilities are not compromised.
Lastly, how the research is conducted affects the results. The majority of studies are performed on cyclists and swimmers. Although they are endurance athletes too, their training is radically different — if they drop their volume by 50 percent, which might mean going from four to five hours per day of training to two to three hours, they are still getting a substantial aerobic stimulus.
The Physiology of Peaking
Given the above information, it should be clear why the lab results don’t translate very well to the practical world, but what actually causes the improvement in performance when peaking? Early on, scientists hypothesized that changes in our ability to transport and utilize oxygen may be enhanced. While researchers found changes in the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood through increased hemoglobin or red blood cell mass, very few studies demonstrated an increase in VO2 max (maximal oxygen consumption).