This
is THE question. Every swimmer wants to taper but resting takes a lot more courage
than training. Training is, relatively speaking, easy .Resting changes
everything. It leaves you often feeling unsettled, nervous and often messes up your
sleep patterns. Plus you have all this extra time and energy.
Our
senior club trains 15 hours a week. Not a lot compared to some others,
especially back in the day. Yet if you trim that by 1/3 to 10 hours, what do
you do with those extra 5 hours? Maybe go a little bit crazy?
Here
is the truth. To get faster you need to do 2 things: 1- work hard and 2 – rest.
That’s it. But most athletes don’t work as hard as they think they do and few
if any rest enough to make a real difference.
How
can a person tell what advice to follow? That’s simple as well. In our sport of
swimming look to the most accomplished coaches and see what they have to say on
this, or frankly, any subject close to the sport. Accomplished coaches are
those who have a long track record of success with a variety of swimmer types.
When
it comes to taper we believe (based upon the above criteria) that you either
need to rest 3 days or 3 weeks. Nothing in between has long term time measured
validity. Some may even need more than 3 weeks. 1 week or 2 weeks or 10 days
just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Something
else to consider…there are 3 items to consider around taper time…the tech suit,
the shave, the rest. In our opinion, rest is the most important. It takes
enormous amounts of courage to rest. First and foremost, train as hard as you
can, then train some more. Then take 3 days or 3 weeks rest and watch how fast
you swim.
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