What is tapering, and why do athletes train less before competing?

A planned reduction in training load before competition, allowing accumulated fatigue to dissipate while fitness is retained — and the reason it works is that the two decay at very different rates.

The underlying model. Performance is frequently described as fitness minus fatigue. Hard training builds both. Fatigue dissipates comparatively quickly; fitness decays slowly. A taper exploits that gap: reduce the load, and fatigue falls away while fitness remains largely intact — so performance rises without any new training being done.

What the research supports, and it is unusually specific for a training question:

Reduce volume substantially — commonly cited figures are 40–60% of normal load.

Maintain intensity. This is the crucial finding and the one athletes get wrong: dropping intensity loses fitness, while dropping volume does not. Hard sessions continue; they are shorter and fewer.

Maintain or slightly reduce frequency, since training regularly preserves neuromuscular patterning.

Taper length of roughly one to three weeks, depending on the event and the preceding load.

A progressive rather than a step reduction generally outperforms an abrupt drop.

Typical performance improvements reported in meta-analyses are in the region of a few percent — which is enormous in competitive terms.

Why athletes resist it. Reducing training before the most important event feels wrong, and the taper frequently produces feeling worse before feeling better — heavy legs, restlessness, sometimes minor illness as training stress lifts. This is common enough to have a name among coaches, and mistaking it for lost fitness leads athletes to train through the taper and undo it.

What else happens during a taper: glycogen stores replenish, muscle damage repairs, hormonal and immune markers normalise, and sleep quality improves.

The related mistakes:

Adding training in the final fortnight, which cannot improve fitness in time and can only add fatigue.

Changing anything — equipment, nutrition, routine — before a key event.

Tapering too long, which does begin to lose fitness.

Carrying the taper mindset into the event, since sharpness needs maintaining.