Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [101]
If you prepare for a game or race in the same way that you prepare for your usual workouts, you won’t be well-rested enough to maximize your performance. On the other hand, you shouldn’t try new foods, sleep habits, or training techniques right before a competition. By fine-tuning these elements and developing a familiar routine, you can give yourself an edge over your competitors when it counts and elevate your game (not practice).
How should I adjust my training in the final days before a competition?
In general, the fitter you are, the better you’ll perform in any athletic contest. As a result, many beginners try to pack in as much training as possible in the final days before a race—hoping, perhaps, to make up for skipped sessions in previous months. But this is one kind of test you can’t cram for. Every training session you do stresses your body, causing it to adapt in response—eventually. But this doesn’t happen instantly, so sessions in the last week or two just add to your fatigue without boosting your fitness. It’s not a good idea to stop training entirely, though, since you need to keep reinforcing the needed patterns of muscle movement. Instead, most athletes perform a “taper” in which training is gradually reduced, leading up to the competition in a way that maximizes fitness and minimizes fatigue.
The chief training variables that you can play with in endurance sports are volume, frequency, and intensity: how far you go, how often, and how hard. You can reduce your training all at once with a “step” taper or gradually cut back with a “progressive” taper. To evaluate these options, Laurent Bosquet of the University of Montreal and his colleagues assembled 182 studies on tapering in runners, swimmers, and cyclists and combined the most rigorous studies into one giant data set. The conclusion: the most effective taper involves a progressive reduction in training volume of 41 to 60 percent over a period of 8 to 14 days. You shouldn’t change how often or how fast you do your workouts—just make them shorter.
There are a few caveats, Bosquet points out. First, the individual response to tapering can differ greatly: “Some athletes need as few as three or four days to dissipate fatigue, while others need three to four weeks,” he says. This also depends on your level of training: if you’re running only three times a week, your taper might simply consist of resting for the final two days before a race. A more subtle limitation is that studies tend to stick to tried-and-true tapering techniques, since it’s hard to find enough competitive athletes willing to risk their season by trying a researcher’s untested tapering scheme. For instance, theoretical models have predicted that resting in anticipation of a major competition, then ramping the training load back up again just before the race would actually be more effective than a straightforward taper. Bosquet is experimenting with this technique with athletes he coaches, but it has yet to be studied in a full-fledged trial.
Team sports are more difficult to analyze because success depends on so many different factors, and because high levels of performance need to be maintained over many weeks during playoff seasons. But the same principles of balancing the benefits of training with the risks of fatigue apply. Leading up to the 2002 World Cup, Swedish researchers recruited 11 top-notch European soccer teams (including Manchester United, Arsenal, AC Milan, Juventus, and Real Madrid) to monitor the training and playing load of their players. The data showed that the players who went on to underperform at the World Cup had played an average of 12.5 matches during the final 10 weeks of the season, while the players who exceeded expectations had played only nine matches—a clear sign that some form of tapering helped players get rid of