By Olivier Poirier-Leroy on SwimSwam
If you’ve tapered more than a handful of times, you know the feeling…
You’re a few days into what’s supposed to be the “feeling good and fast” part of tapering and it feels more like “swimming slow and slothy.”
Stroke feels like you have forgotten how to swim. Legs feel heavy. Looking at the clock you wince at how slow you are going.
Is this taper broken?
Feeling flat at some point during the taper is off-putting and counter-intuitive, but it’s part of the process.
Here’s a look at what’s happening.
Muscles are (slowly) recovering
Tapering is all about recovery, but this process isn’t instant. It takes time. And in some cases, you don’t fully recover from the hard work you did (and that’s okay, as we will see).
For example, a study by Ribeiro et al. (2023) measured swimmers’ force production at every stage of their training leading up to a 100 freestyle time trial.
Before the big training block. After the hard training was done. During the taper. And after the time trial was completed.
When taper started, swimmers’ muscles were weaker than when the training block had started. The hard training did its job, grinding them down.
(Hard training is hard, after all.)
But after two weeks of tapering, those baseline force numbers still didn’t fully return. And yet, swimmers still went ~3% faster. They swam fast even though they didn’t recover 100%.
So even though recovery was happening, and the PBs arrived as scheduled, swimmers were not fully recovered from a muscular standpoint.
Taper is mental, too
When swimmers taper, mood starts to improve. During hard training, our muscles get sore and beat up, and those brutal sets and workouts also have an impact on our mindset.
Hard training causes depression, anger, fatigue, and confusion to steadily rise while vigor and energy decline (Raglin et al., 1991). Mood also tracks with the work we are doing in the water. The harder we train, generally the worse we feel mentally and emotionally (Morgan et al., 1988).
Tapering doesn’t automatically fix this:
Tension remains elevated during taper. Although mood generally improves as volume comes down, tension is the exception (Taylor et al., 1997). This typically happens because we’ve traded the mental exhaustion of training for the nerves and anxiety of upcoming competition. Delayed recovery. When tapering, our muscles start to bounce back pretty fast, with soreness typically gone within a couple of days. But the effects of training on stress and our overall sense of recovery can be significantly delayed, as seen in a group of elite German swimmers. In their case, muscle soreness resolved quickly, but feelings of readiness, mood, and overall recovery lagged by as much as 7 days in some cases (Collette et al., 2018).The mental part of tapering is perhaps the most challenging—we’re overthinking everything, assigning mega-importance to the slightest performance deviation.
Tapering isn’t an overnight cure for the mental effects of all those months of grinding and working.
Swimmers respond differently
Swimmers respond in a variety of ways to tapering. Some swimmers bounce back right away. Others are slow and sluggish coming out of the gates but finally get there just as competition is about to kick off.
A study with Eddie Reese’s swimmers at Texas in 2006 tracked his group through the overload phase into conference championships and then NCAA championships.
The Longhorn swimmers had a variety of responses to tapering, as measured by power output:
A majority (54%) of swimmers had a biphasic response. They showed an early spike in power, dipped slightly in week two, and then peaked during competition week. Early responders (25%) had a fantastic first week of taper and then leveled off. And late responders (21%)—the holy chlorinated pull-buoys why do I still feel like hot garbage in the water group—took their sweet time recovering, showing a slower rise in power output. In the end, they did great, but it took the full taper for them to generate peak power.Interestingly, the response variety was across all event distances. Sprinters, distance swimmers—it was a proper blending of responses across the board.
Different swimmers, different timelines, but ultimately, taper worked for all three groups.
Focus on Process, Not Feel
Swimmers obsess over feel when it comes to their relationship with the water, and during taper this gets taken to another level.
But the reality is that a successful taper is not inherently reliant on what you are feeling from moment to moment, from set to set.
Because tapering is rebuilding the stuff that you can’t see or feel.
Fast-twitch muscle fibers, glycogen stores, and the microscopic muscle damage created by months of absolutely cooking those main sets.
This repair happens quietly at the cellular level while you are staring at the clock in befuddled amazement at how off you feel in the water.
And the timeline it happens on will differ by training history, phase of the season, and your stress levels leading into taper.
Feeling flat at some point when tapering is normal.
Keep recovering. Protect intensity. Follow the process.
And remember:
“You do not have to feel good to swim fast.” – Bob BowmanABOUT THE AUTHOR
Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national-level swimmer, 2x Olympic Trials qualifier, and author of several books for swimmers, including YourSwimBook, Conquer the Pool, and Tapering for Sprint Freestylers.
The book is a 98-page eBook packed with actionable insights and research into what makes an explosive taper unfold on schedule. Everything from duration to taper type to managing your dryland to navigating the mental ups and downs of tapering for sprinters.
Tapering for Sprint Freestylers combines evidence-based insights with a collection of 15 ready-to-go sets (plus the “regular” versions to better understand how they scale down), a Taper Blueprint to plan your taper like a pro, and a 12-week sample resisted sprint program to show you how all the principles come together.
No more guesswork or hoping for taper miracles.
Show up on race day explosive, fast, and dangerous.
Learn more about Tapering for Sprint Freestylers
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