Hi everyone, and welcome to week eight. Ingrid joins me for this one, and I asked her what every athlete’s favourite time of year is. Her answer was immediate. This week is about the taper: what happens physiologically when you deliberately back off before something that matters, why the research disagrees with how most people do it, and how to use the same principle before a presentation or a meeting that counts.
Watch time = 5 minutes. This week’s prompt is below the video.
These videos were filmed over the summer, so the countdowns you hear won’t match today’s date.
The Taper
I asked Ingrid what every athlete’s favourite time of year is. Tapering, one hundred percent, no hesitation. And what do you do during a taper? “As little as humanly possible.” And then what happens? “You go insanely fast at whatever you were tapering for.”
That’s how it feels from the inside. The research says something slightly different, and the difference is where most people get this wrong.
Back in week one I wrote about stopping altogether, which is what Ingrid and I did for months while her ankle and my feet healed. A taper is a different thing. It’s short, it’s planned, it happens on a date you’ve chosen, and you don’t stop.
Here’s what the evidence says. Bosquet and colleagues pooled 27 studies of competitive athletes and found that tapering improves performance by around 3%, with a usual range of half a percent to six. For an endurance athlete that’s the difference between a good day and the best race of your life. The conditions that produced that result were specific: cut your training volume by 41 to 60%, reduce it progressively rather than all at once, and hold your intensity and your session frequency unchanged. Eight to fourteen days is the sweet spot.
Volume down by half. Intensity untouched. When the hard sessions get softened along with everything else, the benefit disappears, and that’s the error people make when they hear “rest before the big event” and interpret it as going easy.
What’s happening inside you during those two weeks is repair and restocking. Your muscle glycogen refills. The accumulated damage from months of training gets repaired instead of added to. Your neuromuscular system recovers its ability to produce force quickly. You arrive carrying all the adaptation from the work and none of the fatigue.
The classical teaching model for this is supercompensation: you stress the system, it rebuilds past where it started. It’s a useful picture and it’s a simplification, since what’s actually happening is fitness and fatigue decaying at different rates, with fatigue falling away faster than fitness. The taper works because you’re exploiting that gap.
There’s a mental piece too. When you’re moving in a rhythm that’s demanding but manageable, you can drop into a state where the self-monitoring quiets down and the performance runs itself. Arne Dietrich proposed an explanation he called transient hypofrontality, where activity in parts of your prefrontal cortex decreases during sustained exercise, which would reduce your capacity to overthink what you’re doing. The human imaging evidence is partial and the theory is still argued over. The state is real whether or not that’s the right mechanism, and you reach it through rhythm and sufficient challenge rather than through effort.
Music helps here, and this one is well established. Listening to music while you exercise lowers your rating of perceived exertion, which means the same work feels easier. It also lifts mood. The effect is strongest at low and moderate intensities and fades as you approach maximum, because at that point the signals from your body crowd out everything else. For a week of walking marathons, that’s exactly the intensity range where music does its best work.
Your 1% this week: take the next thing that actually matters to you, a presentation, a difficult conversation, a race, and clear the ground in front of it. Make it an if-then: when I have something important the next morning, I finish work by 6pm the night before. Keep the preparation. Cut the volume of everything else.
