By Olivier Poirier-Leroy on SwimSwam
Swimming fast is a lot of hard work—all those early mornings, doubles, long threshold sets, overflowing pile of soggy towels.
All so that we can stand up on the block and let it rip on race day.
But before we can do that, there is the taper.
Swimmers certainly have a love-hate relationship with tapering, as it can be a roller-coaster of emotions and competing performances.
One day you feel like you got shot out of a cannon, going near PBs, the next day you are swimming like a pile of rotten goggle straps.
Here are six science-backed taper strategies that help swimmers arrive at the blocks fresh, fast, and ready to race.
Earn the taper
A good—nay, great—taper starts before that first reduced session gets written up on the board.
In the weeks and months leading up to taper, the hard work needs to be worked hard and more sneakily, training should be optimized to ease into it so that you aren’t ending the big training block with the most brutal training of the season.
This is a classic mistake—cramming one last monster session (or three) on Sunday night when taper starts on Monday. While good-intentioned, this aggressive peaking strategy doesn’t work.
Studies with swimmers and athletes show that when we go directly into a hard overload block into taper they don’t fully recover and end up underperforming on race day.
Instead, your heaviest training of the season should be 4-6 weeks before competition, with a slight easing in the final 1-2 weeks before taper kicks off.
Elite swimmers who followed this pattern hit their taper and swam fast on race day, improving ~2.4%, outperforming swimmers who smashed out workouts right up against the taper (Hellard et al., 2013).
Arrive at taper semi-fatigued, not ground into the pool deck.
Volume is the main taper lever
Volume is the most important lever in your taper. Race day performance responds most to how much you reduce total training volume.
The sweet spot with swimmers is a 41-60% reduction from peak training load (Bosquet et al., 2007).
Cutting too little (~20%) has little to no effect—swimmers are still tired and fatigue lingers. Cutting too much (over 60%) is less consistent and opens the door to losing feel for the water, rhythm, and some of the fitness you painstakingly built.
Like most things in the water, tapering is a classic Goldilocks challenge. Not too much, not too little.
Keep the speed, ditch the gray zone
Not all the training load that you drop should be the same. Intensity needs to stay up. When swimmers reduced intensity when tapering, performance gains were small to non-existent (Bosquet et al., 2007).
But when we keep intensity while reducing overall volume, PBs get dropped.
For sprinters especially, this is non-negotiable. Fast work should be genuinely fast—95% of max speed and up. Easy work should be genuinely easy—below 70% for warming up and recovery laps.
The gray zone between—moderate intensity swimming that is too aggressive for recovery and too slow to promote speed—is the stuff to cut. Lots of this type of swimming during tapering has been consistently linked with slower performances (Hellard et al., 2017).
Cut volume and keep the vroom-vroom.
Keep showing up
Dropping volume doesn’t mean going Ghost Mode and disappearing from the aquatic center for two weeks. Effective tapers reduce volume while keeping intensity and largely maintaining frequency.
Aim for 80-90% of your typical training frequency to keep that daily rhythm of swimming that keeps your taper-brain from spiraling off.
There are some other good reasons to maintain frequency:
Sustains your schedule – Swimmers are riding a roller coaster of “feel great” and “feel really not great” during taper. A familiar schedule is an anchor of comfort during this process. Maintains feel for the water – Getting in the water, even if the workout is shorter, sustains proprioception and feel for the water. Swimmers are sensitive to this stuff and judge a lot of their taper and future performances based on how they feel in the pool. Frequency keeps that relationship strong.Shorten your workouts instead of wholesale ditching them.
Sleep lots
Taper is when recovery finally has a chance to catch up to your training, so give it every chance to do so by sleeping lots.
Sleep is the best and most enjoyable recovery tool we have at our disposal, so abuse the heck out of it during this phase of the season.
A recent study with NCAA Division I swimmers showed that sleep duration—surprise, surprise—explained a big chunk of performance differences between swimmers, with consistent ~8 hour nights of sleep strongly linked to faster racing (Lundstrom et al., 2025).
Feeling off is part of the process
Here’s what really makes swimmers mental during taper—feeling flat, off, lethargic, and stressed. These are things we didn’t sign up for—or anticipate—when taper started. We are in the home stretch and should be feeling awesome and peppy.
But recovery doesn’t happen overnight, and the timeline for it varies by swimmer and training history.
One study with elite German swimmers saw that while muscle soreness resolved within a couple of days, other measures of recovery, including feelings of readiness, mood and overall recovery took up to a week to happen.
Additionally, you’ll find that mood improves with your taper—reduced training leads to less crankiness and depression, which track tightly with overall training load. But tension does not come down.
Why?
Because we are trading the mental stress of hard training for the nerves and anxiety for upcoming competition.
As long as you are sleeping lots, reducing training load according to plan, and showing up to the pool, the taper will do its thing. Even if you have to white-knuckle a few days of uncertainty along the way.
“I always hit a point in taper where I’m feeling pretty crappy in the water. Now, I expect that and I know that’s part of it, so I just kind of accept it and try not to really think too much about it.” – Emma McKeon
The Bottom Line
Tapering works. Swimmers can expect a performance boost of ~2% when it’s done properly, you’ve put in the work leading up to it, and you keep your sanity mostly in check during the process.
The big thing to remember is that tapering is removing fatigue while preserving the fitness and strength you built. Taper isn’t a magic phase of training where you are building fitness. You are dusting the fatigue off the work you’ve already done.
So reduce the volume, keep the speed, sleep like a champ, and keep showing up even though there will be days where it feels like the water is peanut butter on your fingers.
ABOUT 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
Read the full story on SwimSwam: Taper in Swimming: How to Swim Your Fastest on Race Day
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