I have a week long event coming up in two weeks. I've been using the SEALFit workouts in preparation. Would those of you in the know recomend a taper period? In my experience, this would be recomended. If you would recomend tapering, what would that look like to you? Continue the WOD, but scale down weight, reps, or time? All three? Or any combination? Or just look to another sorce (Stew Smith, for example) for tapering?
What is your week long event? Tapering is going to be dependent on the event. For instance if your week long event is drinking beer at the river, you dont need to taper, but if its a 5 day adventure race, by all means, taper. Provided you are eating correctly you are not going to lose a significant amount of fitness in two weeks even if you took everyday off, but I would suggest stretching, bodyweight calesthenics, easy running, biking, swimming etc... Go get a good sweat. A taper is not designed to stress you out its to recover and re-charge and it depends on your fitness level and the event you are preparing for. General rule is just take the two weeks and do a little something 3-4 days a week just enough to keep the blood flowing.
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Rob
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Crossfit Level 1 Trainer
Crossfit Level 1 Running
For track/XC/running athletes, a taper usually means you do the same number of runs and workouts per week, but you slash the volume of those workouts, and maybe throw in a little speed. So if you had been doing 40 miles per week on 6 runs with 2 interval workouts, you might go down to 30 miles on 5 or 6 runs with 2 interval workouts. The intervals would still be fast, but there wouldn't be nearly as many of them. This is a pretty reasonable principle to follow for any kind of event, but without knowing what you are actually doing, it's hard to be any more specific than that.
For sake of comparisons, let's call it a 6 day adventure race likely to include plenty of running, lifting exercises, bodyweight exercises, problem solving, teamwork, eating on the fly, periods of sleep deprivation, and other things known and unknown.
To answer your question in a meaningful way I would need to understand all of the training you have done to prepare for the event. Absent that information the best I can do is to give you % of work as you taper. I am going to use myself as an example and lets say I have a 100 mile run in two weeks. Two weeks out I would do 60% of my normal training and one week out drop it to 40% with two days off. I would take the day before event off and one other additional day so for the five days I would do 40% of what I would normally do on those days.
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I would take 2 days off per week, one of them being the day before the event, and another being 3 days before the event. In between those days, do a warmup and light run.
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Sort of a minor difference, but I'm a believer in taking the day two days before the event off, and then doing a little jog and some dynamic stretching the day before. To each their own.
I agree with all the above that tapering needs to be tailored to your event, training, and personal needs. That being said, here is the general tapering schedule they gave us at the CF Running/Endurance cert:
Tues: 5x5 back squats
Wed: CF WOD + 80-90% interval workout (i.e. 8x200m run)
Thurs: rest
Fri: Tabata run
Sat: off
Sun: Go time
Of course, they said this is only a general idea that they've found effective, it is by no means a strict prescription, and if you haven't been prepping with something similar to their program then it might not work well at all. That being said, I used it recently for the week prior to an Oly distance tri and felt great on race day.
Taper?
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