Hello,
I have just been making my first plan with Coach Jack, and it looks great. However, I have always thought (based on reading reputable literature) that you want to maintain intensity, and decrease volume in a taper week/phase. Thus, I was just wondering what the reason was for the lack of intensity in the leadup to an A-race as shown below.
Cheers.
I would say their is no such thing as reliable literature in this case 
the difference in performance would be so small that it would not be reliable… While people could create nice sounding theoretical ideas, their would be no good supporting studies or proof to back up those claims.
Everyone should be doing sweet spot sounded really good and scientifically valid until someone did a study and showed it performed worse, not saying it is worse, just saying if studies show the opposite of theory then it’s pretty hard to say the theory is correct.
These tapers come from Andrea Morelli one of the best science based cycling coaches of all time who has coached 10s of thousands of cyclists over the last 30 years at all levels of performance. He feels for most, this is the safer option.
So, I would say it’s individual, meaning some people will do better with intensity than others and it’s likely more of a mental benefit than physical one. I would also say if you believe that it’s better it is probably better for you and worth doing a bit of intensity. Even if you just throw in some “fartlek” sprints by feel in your last week. Just to feel that you have pushed it a bit but not to tire yourself out.
Racers have a tendency to over do it as compared to under… It’s much safer to un-do it in the taper week then over-do-it and generally trying to prescribe the right intensity or training for everyone that week is harder and many will do better with no intensity so just prescribing none is safest as a general recommendation.
Interesting, I started researching this to make sure I was right regarding lack of science and I was partially right and you were as well. Meaning many people claim to have evidence that you should retain intensity (supporting your argument) and then they reference studies like this, which is 99% irrelevant in though it sounds like it supports the idea of keeping intensity up.
In the example above they have a 10week taper If you were going to do a 10 week taper, I would agree 100% you should keep intensity up. The problem is there is no science that represent short tapers like our 6-day taper although I do feel that sprinkling it a bit of intensity for the mental aspects do provide benefits, more to some than others, for very hard/fast races it would seem more appropriate. I am still double checking with Andrea to make sure he can’t give a more nuanced answer and we potentially change the type of taper based on the race intensity / duration.
Ok your situation is semi-unique, in that you are training 6/7 days a week here so actually Andrea said looking at this he agrees their should be some intensity in it. I will actually find out what he thinks is correct in this situation, but I would also say that we will improve our taper based on this discussion so thanks for bringing it up…
Hey Alex,
Thanks for the reply, and that would be great to hear what Andrea would recommend! I am tapering for an XCO MTB race, if that makes a difference.
Appreciate the help!
As I also train 6+ sessions/week (currently 4 sessions/week in TD plus 2–3 gym sessions) as Master athlete, I have similar questions but am surely very interested in advice. In fact macro-cycles/periodization and tapering are probably my main concern for training-software advice, not so much the workouts themselves…
Previously, I did short 4 x 3’ % 110 % or even 3 x 3"/4 x 2’ @ 120 % 3–4 days before a race. Plus “warmers” the day before the race. Seemed to have worked reasonably well, but maybe I would have done even better with a different approach.
Any advice
I would argue that macro-cycles/periodization and tapering are more important that the workouts themselves as long as you are getting good variety, volume and recovery. Coach Robert likes 3-month periodization cycles. Coach Jack allows 6 month plans mostly but we for many people early is a good approach. It would be nice for us to dig deeper into this and help people choose a good periodization strategy. I saw one guy on the TR forums say he is fire fighter and 7 day weeks don’t work for him for example.
There is so many different variables.
So we are going to completely re-design the Coach Jack taper after talking to Andrea. It might take a while to launch it but I am going to use your example as one that we try to optimize. Once I have Andrea approve my version of what he suggested then I can share with you here. Hopefully that should be in the next 2-weeks. So CJ might not give it by the time you need it but you can easily just add your own taper based on what I provide back and for sure it will include more intensity.
That sounds amazing Alex, and I look forward to hearing back in the coming weeks! It is really great you’re so open to change. I am really happy to have stumbled across TrainerDay. I’ll be recommending it to many more people.
Hey Alex, just wondering if Andrea approved your new taper plan? Just hoping, as my taper begins next week, and I’d love to implement the updated method.
Sorry for the delay. His suggestion is rather practical as usual And that your peak period has specific goals and usually that includes some anaerobic work (for most cyclists). So because you are trying to achieve something with this peak period, you want to hold on to those gains… So hold on, but at the same time reduce stress.
So you should just do these workouts same workouts you were doing the previous week but cut the number of intervals in half, yet just inject them into say your same Monday and Wed workouts during the taper. You could clone the previous weeks, edit and lower other intensities and reduce the overall length… 1/2 Dynamic force intervals + 30 minutes of zone 2 for example.
It’s probably a month before my developer has this built into coach jack, he is about to start a bunch of features including this one.
I am in the middle of discussing one other addition to this taper with Andrea. I will let you know hopefully later today or tomorrow.
Great, thanks Alex. Sounds good 
