Tapering for Ultrarunning with Iñigo Mujika PhD | Koopcast Episode 86

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and on this episode of the podcast we have another one of the heavy hitters in the endurance realm it is inigo mujica who is the godfather of tapering for endurance events if you are not familiar with inigo's work you certainly should be and i can guarantee you that if you've gone through a race and if you have done a taper yourself you have been influenced by inigo's work i found this conversation absolutely fascinating and it was an honor to host him on the podcast as i have used his work throughout my coaching career to inform how to taper my athletes for various events i can't say enough about inigo and his research he is one of the true scientists out there that has that also has a wealth of experience on the practical side of things getting athletes ready for events i know it's summertime i know you guys are thinking about your last little bits of training and i know that you're thinking about how you want to arrange your last few weeks so that you can reap all of the hard-earned benefits of all of your training

to the greatest extent during the tapering process so i hope that this podcast provides you with a little bit of a guide on how to arrange those last few crucial weeks so here we go let's get right into it here's my conversation with inigo majica i want to know first off like what's on your plate right now like you play in a lot of different endurance and team sports i seem to like see you everywhere like everywhere i look you've got your fingerprints kind of all over these different sports like what does it look like right now what's the day and life like for you well um at the moment my main occupation is uh i'm the sports science uh coordinator for spanish aquatics so i am in charge of uh sports science in in pool swimming open water swimming uh water polo diving and synchronized swimming but most of the time is dedicated to swimming swimming but i have PhD students who are doing their work in uh in rugby uh in professional cycling and also another one who is working on power lifting so that's that's probably why you see my name in different areas mostly because i'm co-supervising PhD students who are working in different sports

do you feel that that breadth helps you across all of those areas because you're talking about now not only endurance sports but you're talking about endurance sports that are largely technique driven being swimming versus endurance sports that are more like purely cardiovascular like cycle like cycling would be which you have a big footprint in that sport as well all the way down to power lifting like do you feel that makes you better across all of them like having that breadth uh i don't do it in that uh sense i just do it because it's more fun you know having i'm always uh i'm always uh trying to to have fun you know when when when i talk about uh work with friends and i say so how does it feel to work because for for me yeah it is work but uh it's mostly about having fun so if if i'm interested in the topic of uh some student who comes up to me and requests my supervision and uh you know i i say yes but i don't say yes uh because i'm looking for uh a wide uh a very wide uh spectrum of professional expertise or anything like that this just because if i feel that i can help someone and and the project seems solid and interesting and and fun i uh i go for it excellent

well we're going to talk about one of the areas where i was really introduced to your work and i would say at least from the outside looking in it's probably one of the areas that you have made the most impact on like when you go back and you're an 80 year old man and you look back on your career i'm going to gather that this area is the most fond area that that people can continue to draw information from and this is this area of tapering your name shows up all over the literature if you just search taper in any database you want to you're going to be the heavy hitter in that uh on that on that search term so what i want to do is i want to start out by by discussing the general framework of tapering for an endurance event and then how we can adapt that framework into an ultra marathon season because this podcast is going to come out i'm going to strategically plan it for the perfect point where everybody is about to start racing in their summer season and tapering is at the top of their list and as you know tapering tends to make endurance athletes crazy so hopefully this can be a little bit of a guidepost that athletes can use when they're designing their own training or if coaches are listening to this if they're helping athletes design their training so let's kind of start out uh in a go with the fundamentals what are the fundamental aspects of tapering down for an event any endurance event that athletes need to be aware

up as they're going through that process well i think the first thing that they need to have clear in their heads is that the the main aim of the taper is to optimize the adaptations that they've been achieving throughout months of uh solid training but at the same time getting rid of the fatigue that they have also been accumulating so uh i would say that the main goal is to dissipate accumulation and if simultaneously they can optimize their adaptations uh that's an extra point but the main goal is not to to get even better you can get even better but the main goal is to make sure that you dissipate the fatigue that you've been accumulating because this is about the balance between how much adaptations you have been or how many adaptations or what level of adaptations you've been able to achieve but quite often those adaptations have been hidden by the fatigue that you've been accumulating so as you reduce the training load you manage to dissipate that fatigue and the adaptations that you already have start showing up but we also know that as you dissipate that accumulated fatigue you also recover your ability to adapt to the training that you do and that can help you further the adaptations that you have previously

achieved during months of intensive training so that would be point number one the goal of the taper is to uh come to a positive balance between adaptations and accumulated fatigue point number two is how you achieve that and how you manipulate the training variables so that uh you optimize those adaptations at the same time as you dissipate that fatigue and in that sense we can manipulate uh mainly three training variables training intensity training volume and training frequency or in other words how hard you train how much you train and how often you train and research has shown that maintaining intensity is key if you want to maintain or even optimize those adaptations that you already have so you should not be manipulating your training during the taper at the expense of training intensity that doesn't mean that you should not reduce the amount of training at high intensity you should maintain the intensity but when you reduce your total amount of training it's going to be at the expense of low intensity training but also at the expense of high intensity training so if you have a proportion a proportion of say 80 percent low to moderate intensity 20 high intensity

you can maintain that same proportion so that means that everything is going to be reduced but the the speed of the high intensity work should be maintained during the taper so that leads that to the second point the second point the second point is okay if you cannot manipulate intensity too much how do we reduce the training load and the answer is mainly by reducing training volume how much you train yes you can reduce the duration of each training session or you can get rid of some training sessions but that should not uh be the main way of reducing the training volume you should not reduce the training volume just by getting rid of training sessions it is better to reduce the distance of or the duration of those training sessions but to do them usually uh we recommend that training frequency should not be reduced by more than about 20 percent and in particular in sports that are very dependent on technique because if you eliminate training sessions you might lose the feel and feel is very important for athletes in all sports and even more so in sports that are very dependent

on on on on technique and the application of that technique for an efficient uh movement pattern another variable that we can manipulate during the taper is the duration of the taper how long before the big competition you start reducing the training load and research has been showing repeatedly that as a general rule for the big majority of athletes athletes we should go for a two-week taper yes we can then individualize and and fine-tune the duration and for some athletes it might be better to extend the taper a little bit for some athletes it might be better to reduce the duration of the taper a little bit but as a general rule if we have to give a uh recommendation that will suit most people we would recommend to go for a two-week taper and then finally uh another general rule that we can recommend is that the shape of the reduction of the training load the training load do we suddenly cut our training load by half or do we progressively cut our training load as the competition approaches well research uh seems to show in particular for running and swimming that a progressive taper in which the the training load is uh reduced not

not all of a sudden but more progressively as the competition approaches is more effective than a step taper and we call a step taper uh a non-standardized um sorry a non-progressive standardized reduction of the training load so for example if i am training uh 10 miles a day suddenly i start running only uh seven miles a day that would be a step taper and that seems to be not as effective as reducing progressively so those would be the general rules that apply for the big majority of people in the majority of sports i'm gonna go back to the very first one because i think that this is really interesting and can probably be a bridge from some of the traditional endurance sports to ultra marathon running you said right off of the right out of the gate that the primary role of the taper is to first reduce the amount of fatigue first reduce the amount of fatigue and then maybe as a bonus optimize the underlying physiology in all we do see tapering strategies out there that in my estimation flip the order of those two

they're looking at the optimization first trying to create muscle tension or trying to create some sort of like super adaptation within the training cycle at the expense of reducing the overall fatigue that the actual that the athlete actually has and normally it's trying to take it's trying to take advantage of a specific like race situation right looking at okay this is what's going to happen during the race we're going to try to optimize this physiology during during this taper but in order to do so we're not optimizing the reduction of of fatigue why should it be in that order i guess fundamentally why should we look at tapering through first reducing the amount of fatigue and then through optimizing the physiology well let me make it clear that i i haven't presented that as a temporal situation of a temporal order of first reduce fatigue then optimize uh adaptations uh i'm just talking about the the level of priority correct and a lot a lot of what we know about the effects of tapering comes from the application of mathematical modeling and what we have learned is that the main relationship of performance improvement improvement as a result of the taper is not with improved physiological adaptations but with reduced

accumulated fatigue so the mathematical models indicate that the main reason or the main driver of improved performance is reduced fatigue that doesn't mean that first you reduce fatigue and then you optimize adaptations but in terms of uh in quantitative terms it is more important to reduce fatigue than it is to optimize the adaptations because that accumulated fatigue is what is hiding the adaptations that are already there most of the adaptations are already there uh further developments of the mathematical modeling approach have shown that as a result of the taper you can also recover physiological capacities that were impaired by intensive training and when you recover those physiological capacities then you can train better and that better training might lead to additional adaptations during the taper but that's not gonna happen if you are still fatigued if you are carrying over a lot of fatigue because you will be unable to perform that really good high quality training during the taper and the three main flavors that you can reduce this fatigue are reducing training load through reducing the volume reducing the frequency and reducing the volume of of intensity

and there's all these different kind of contrived ways to do it which you mentioned a stepwise taper or more of a progressive more of a progressive taper or a linear taper and most of the research has shown that this non-linear reduction in training in training volume training load in order to induce a taper is the most effective why is that the case why is that the case why is a non-linear load first off i think we can go and re-describe what a non-linear uh reduction in training load actually looks like but why in fact is that the case and what are the underlying physiological mechanisms for that to for that to be like the leader of the pack that's a that's a difficult question to uh to answer because um we don't have enough research comparing one method with the other so this this uh conclusion comes from the application of a meta-analytical approach to the available research uh so the the linear reduction means that uh let's say you reduce your training volume each day by one mile and in that way one day you run 10 miles the next day nine the next day seven then s eight the next day seven and so on that's simply an example uh the exponential way or the uh non-linear way would mean that

the the the the beginning of the taper the drop in training load is higher and then it tends to become more stable uh one possible reason why that is uh more effective is that you might tend to dissipate fatigue quicker at the beginning of the taper and that allows you to do uh more high quality more high quality work as the taper goes on and then you can optimize those adaptations that we were mentioning before that might be one possible reason but we don't have enough uh physiology based research to give you a precise answer about that so just to like mathematically describe this a little bit we'll we'll keep our uh example of a runner's running 10 miles a day right so in the first week of the taper they might reduce that to six miles a day and then the second week of the taper they might reduce that to four miles a day so they're taking a big chunk right out of the gate and that would be more of a stepwise taper but if you wanted to kind of like draw the you know draw the conclusion in between all those days i think the listeners would get the point you're reducing things very quickly early on and then they kind of level out closer to uh to the race sometimes figuring out that exact mathematical model is a little bit impractical right because people like round numbers they like their routes and they like to you know stick to certain things but let's practically walk

through this example for just a normal endurance athlete in terms of about what the what those volume reductions should actually look like on an order of percentage so that the listeners at home can internalize okay i'm running 40 miles a week during taper week number one this is what it should look like and then during taper week number two that is what it should look like what are those percentages typically look like for an endurance athlete and then we'll try to get more specific within ultra running well from that meta-analysis that i mentioned before uh what came out was that the ideal reduction of training volume that applies to most athletes would be between 40 and 60 percent of the volume that you usually do in the pre-taper meso cycle so let's say in the final four weeks before you start tapering um you've been training you the average daily training of those final four weeks is 10 miles well the average of your taper should be between six and four miles how you get to there could be by simply doing every day uh six miles or every day five miles and that would put you in that range or you might get there by doing in the first few days of the taper seven miles 6.5 six uh 5.55 and then in the final

three four five days of the taper you are simply running uh 2.8 2.5 2.3 2.2 and at the end when you add up all the volume that you have done it comes to uh an average daily mileage during the taper of four to six miles okay so there is no magic about doing exactly 2.8 2.7 2.6 but uh when when we do uh research studies if we want to apply an exponential model uh to our taper that's how i do it that's how i calculate it right and and i tell and i tell the athletes today you should be running 2.6 but you know on a on a on a real world of uh of athletics you don't need to be so um so precise about the amount as long as the total amount falls within that range of 40 to 60 percent so i like the fact that we've already brought out the precision is probably unnecessary as long as you're getting the percentages close so let's take this initial framework of we're going to use a two-week taper and we're going to back off the total amount of volume somewhere between 40 and 60 percent by the end of the taper using this exponential decay it's going to it's going to the training volume is going to drop off

quickly initially not not by the end of the taper in the total amount of the total amount yep the total weekly amount or the total amount of the taper should be between 40 and 60 percent of your typical amount before the taper okay so starting out with that initial framework for a typical endurance athlete ultra runners have this interesting proposition where the duration of the event is usually in excess of even what we see at the ironman distance sometimes it's days how can ultra runners look at this two-week 60 reduction proposition do they need to modify it for this specific sport and if so in what ways would you theorize that that modification is necessary does it need to be longer does it need to be shorter does it need to be more what conclusions can we draw from some of the underlying physiology look jason i i like to base my recommendations always on the available research and the available research does not show any differences depending on the event duration so the recommendations that i have given so far at least according to the research applies uh to all events irrespective of the event duration that means

that those recommendations are valid for someone who is running a 100 meter sprint for someone who is running a 1500 meter event or a mile or for someone who is running a marathon or an ultra marathon it's not according to the research it is not the duration of the event and therefore the metabolic contribution to power provision during the event what will determine the ideal characteristics of the taper what determines the ideal characteristics of the taper is not the event it's the athlete and that means that within the world of ultra runners you might have athletes who will benefit from a shorter taper and athletes who will benefit from a longer taper and within the world of sprinters you will have athletes benefiting from a shorter taper or a longer taper so it's not the event that is going to determine how you taper it is the athlete that is going to determine how you taper every podcast i have it comes back to the individual nature of things and it's it's hard for that you can understand it's kind of hard for the listeners who are not domain experts to try to figure to try to figure that out but if what i guide people towards is what has been successful or not successful in the past and can you can you actually draw the conclusion to that's what was successful or unsuccessful right that's a different that's a much harder

conversation to have um jason that that is why we gave recommendations for the big majority of athletes to star of yeah you know those those recommendations of do not reduce the intensity reduce the training load the training volume by 40 to 60 percent try to maintain the frequency relatively high uh go for a two week taper uh go for an exponential taper that is going to apply to most athletes but if for some reason some athlete says well it didn't work for me then you can fine tune and look for alternatives right let's quantify this a little bit because i think that this is another misnomer that's out there in the world in terms of how much this actually impacts performance at the end of the day we know that if we just rest we're going to get a performance benefit just from the rest right you go through training cycles and you apply rest and hopefully the athlete gets a little bit better applying a more precise taper is is is we're trying to do that in the vein of being additive to the normal performance improvement that we get from just everyday mesocycle rest everyday training cycle rest but how much is it actually when we look at the research how much of an impact does applying some sort of tapering strategy actually add to the performance at the end of the day

when you compare your performance before you start tapering to after tapering there is a kind of magic number that comes up uh quite often which is about three percent that doesn't mean that every athlete is going to improve their performance by three percent but there is usually a range of 0.5 to six percent but the average value is going to be around three percent but the difference between getting it right with the taper and just resting is that the risk of losing adaptation and the training if you just stop training is very high whereas the risk of losing adaptation and detraining if you do a taper and you continue training and you optimize your technique to your new physiological capacities is very very low so if an athlete underperforms on the day of the event it is very unlikely to be as a result of losing adaptation if they have gone through a taper but it is likely that they might underperform if they simply stop training because some physiological adaptations are lost very very quickly if you simply stop training but that's not going to happen if you continue training with a taper program that leads me to the next part of this

is what are the risks of none of that's that that's not the way i want to describe it how can athletes screw it up because a lot of tapering is avoiding the negative right just as you mentioned we're trying we're trying to reap all of the positive adaptations and remove all of the all of the negative things that are going on what are some of the pitfalls that athletes should watch out for when they're implementing a tapering process and just trying not to screw it up at that point i tell my athletes this all the time in the last four weeks it's like let's just not screw it up let's not screw it up you've done all the work you've trained for the last year six months or however long it is let's not screw it up in the last few weeks what so what should athletes watch out for in those last couple of weeks as they're implementing their tapers uh i think that the main way of screwing it up would be not resting enough being too afraid of reducing the training volume and getting to the to the race uh unresting as i just said it is much more likely to have a counter performance because you haven't rested enough than because you have rested too much uh that's very unlikely to happen uh also sometimes we might consider that the taper didn't work or i didn't get what i wanted from the taper and it's and it might be that physiologically you were perfectly

ready but psychologically you couldn't cope with the pressure of competition so maybe we we tend to uh overreact to the taper and um overreact to the counter performance and then completely change the taper for the next competition and maybe the taper was fine and maybe you were physiologically ready but you didn't cope with the pressure of competition and in that case you might need a different psychological approach rather than a different paper and another another uh error that uh is often made is completely changing the the training methodology when the taper comes you know sometimes athletes have these uh athletes and coaches too they might have this um tendency to say okay tomorrow we start tapering and suddenly they start doing things that they haven't done before they start doing a completely different type of training you know when they start doing interval training that they haven't done before they stop doing something that they've been doing and the taper should be a natural outgrowth of the training that has been done previously you shouldn't suddenly change completely your your training methodology just because competition is approaching and and and now it's time to taper the taper should be a rational and natural evolution of what you've been

doing previously but yet you just spoke to one of the most fascinating aspects of the taper that i think that actually goes on and this is the classic taper tantrums that athletes have they get irritable they get angsty they start looking at the course profile 10 times a day and they get all psychologically people watching the youtube video can see uh it ago just slapping his ass off right now they get all wrapped up in these things that are not material to their performance at the end of the day as a result of removing this big source of stress that they've had for the last six months and that is all the hard training that they've been doing that's real you've seen it in athletes i've seen in athletes and so much so that i think as coaches we have to do a good job of preparing athletes for this natural consequence what counsel do you give athletes as they're starting to prepare for their taper specifically for this like psychological element of having all of this extra energy around that you want something to do with how do you how do we counsel athletes better on on dealing with that particular aspect of the taper well i i usually say that they simply need to trust the process if they understand what they are doing and why they are doing it or why their coach is doing it uh they should trust the process they should have confidence

uh i have a book on tapering out there i think it's the only book on tapering that is available worldwide and i have contributions from different coaches and different athletes from different sports and one of the contributions comes from bob bowman for those who are ultra runners that don't see anything else and they don't care about any any other sport uh bob bowman is the coach of michael phelps i'm sure they know who michael phelps is anyway bob bowman in this contribution in my book says that we should not overreact because of how an athlete feels on a given training session during the taper you know we need to trust the process if everything has been done well everything has been going well according to plan we know what we are doing we know why we are doing it it doesn't matter if one day five days out of competition an athlete feels like crap because you know we all have good days and bad days and that applies to how uh quickly you are thinking and that applies to how your body is performing as well so maybe an athlete feels terrible one day and he might say oh this is this is awful i i i feel like crap and because we are so close from competition we might tend to overreact and and change everything but that doesn't make any

sense if we trust the process maybe the next day that athlete is going to be flying so we shouldn't uh we shouldn't pay too much attention to how an athlete feels on a given day if everything else has been going according to plan and and we have a plan the problem is when we don't have a plan and we don't know why we are doing things well and i think another issue that goes hand in hand with that is that during the tapering process because the event is is drawing so close there's this zoom in phenomenon that everybody has everything gets scrutinized at a very tight level on the daily on the out sometimes even on the hour or on the minute i felt really good for the first five minutes of this and i felt really bad for the next five minutes in this micro analysis of what is going on from workout to workout during the taper and also within each workout of the taper itself you would never do that during a normal training process you would always have a big picture lens of you're going to have good days and bad days and good intervals and bad intervals and things like that but because the lens gets so tight during the tapering process we tend to hyper react to the things that are going on and i think your point is really well taken that if we have a plan and we trust the plan we're less likely to be suspect to do silly things based off of that noise that is coming in during the tapering process yeah you want to

avoid the paralysis by analysis there you go there you go you you want to avoid that and you know go to practice do your training as planned go home no big deal i felt like shit okay that's fine i felt great okay that's fine too don't don't go crazy about how you felt on a given training session just because you are getting closer to competition you've been training for months one day is one day and and it's just another drop in the water for for the entire training process yeah that's such a good such good words there a lot of times to help stave that off because i think it's boredom i think that just contributes to things right i mean yeah you talk about a 40 to 60 percent increase in the time that they have available during the day right so where are they going to direct that energy other than to analyze training peaks or power files or their paces from their workout or whatever um a lot of times what i'll do to help combat that is just to make sure that they stock up silly honeydew list types of things that they've been putting off during the training process and i always make the joke to my wife that i will change all of the burnt out lights in the house when i'm tapering for my event that is my activity for my tapering so that i'm not thinking about training i can go around in the 20 lights that have burnt out in the last six months i've been stocking up for these last couple of weeks that i can go change them on but the point is is like there's this reservoir of time and energy that is

all of a sudden and very dramatically increased for the athlete that athletes and coaches need to be conscientious of going into it to avoid this stir crazy taper tantrums whatever we want to call it well this idea of having extra time on your hands made me think of another mistake that people might make and that is that you have to taper from something oh i love it i love it that means if if you've been if you've been training uh one hour uh three times a week you don't taper what you need to do is train so you you need to taper your training when you've had enough training that has made you accumulate sufficient fatigue to justify the need for some recovery so that you might super compensate if you are not training enough that you so that your performance is dropping because of that amount of training and that amount of accumulated fatigue the taper is not going to induce any super compensation you are not going to improve your performance so when people tell me yeah well i i i run or or i play rugby twice a week with my with my mates uh how do i taper you don't taper you train

you know i presented that in my book i presented like these uh this like list of tapering steps that people should that people should take step zero is exactly is exactly that and ago it's train make sure that you train first because you have in your words you have to taper from something you have to have some accumulated training load to actually back off of exactly so that that came from this idea of people having more time in their hands well if they've been training one hour or 45 minutes three times a week they don't have more times in their hands they have the same amount of times of time in their hands during the taper because there is no there is no point in tapering when uh when you don't have enough training load previously uh to to induce a drop in your performance that will then produce a super compensation as a result of the taper i want to kind of go back to the fundamentals and maybe we can wrap it up there because um you know all too often in the ultra running crowd you made this comment that is so i don't think you you might not realize how poignant it is a lot of times in the ultra running world we like to live in our own little bubble and think that we have this own special set of physiology that needs to be completely completely catered to in every way shape and form and one of the ways is tapering we need to taper somehow fundamentally different than an iron

man triathlete would taper than a marathon would taper than a hundred meter sprinter would taper and things like that but fundamentally what you're saying is is if we apply these basic concepts of reducing training load maintaining training intensity main training training frequency that all athletes in all sports use we're going to hit almost all of the nail on the head from a tapering perspective as a general rule i would say yes those are the recommendations that apply to most athletes and as i said before maybe you can fine tune a little bit because we have different adaptation and this adaptation profiles so what is going to determine uh your exact tapering strategy is your adaptation and this adaptation profile and that might be uh for one athlete uh quick recovery quick uh achievement of the the peak of super compensation and then quick losing their adaptation so they are they are going to need to get back into solid training very quickly after the main event for another athlete it might represent uh that they they might need a much longer taper because they take longer to recover they take longer to achieve a super compensation peak but maybe they might have a long duration adaptation

and that means that they can perform really well repeatedly despite not being training a lot because they've been tapering and then they've been going from one competition to another competition recovering from uh competition and and and despite a low training load they might be able to um to have very good back-to-back performances so that will determine how you taper and how you approach your competition phase it's not the event it's your own physiology it's your own adaptation and these adaptation profiles and those particular adaptation and these adaptation profiles might be present in sprinting in middle distance running in marathon running and in ultra marathon running can athletes and coaches help derive that individual nature of the training process from the patterns that they pick up in and training because here's one of the things that i always i hate to rely on previous tapers to design future tapers i i do it but i'm hesitant to do so because performance is always so multifactorial there's all these different things that go into this soup of ultimate and one day single day or even even if you're looking at a cycling stage race or something like that there's all these different things that

ultimately go into performance to say but to say well this taper was effective because the performance was good it misses a lot of the elements of that soup so often what i do is i look at the training patterns for a particular athlete how quick is the adaptive response how quickly can they uh how quickly can they recover from certain types of training loads does it take a week does it take three days and things like that and i use that to inform the tapering process that i initially designed and then reinforce it with what's worked and what hasn't worked in the past is that what athletes should be kind of using to inform their tapering process is just how they train week to week month to month that's that's a perfect approach jason i'll tell you a story when when i was doing my PhD i was doing all this analysis on the uh training of elite swimmers and i was applying a mathematical model to come up with the ideal tapering strategy for each one of them which uh which we did and the coaches applied all that but the first time i came with uh with the pool with the outcome of the application of the mathematical model and i presented that to the coaches i said this particular swimmer these characteristics this is how they should taper and the answer was thank you we knew that and because they are the ones who are seeing the swimmers

on a day-to-day basis they are the ones who see if someone adapts quickly if someone recovers quickly if someone takes a long time to recover and and their competition uh capacity come up they are the ones who see these things on a day-to-day basis for them it was a reinforcement of what they already perceived to get my numbers coming from the application of the mathematical model but that is something that a good coach should already perceive and should already feel and if they don't see it or if they don't measure it and if they don't perceive it they could discuss it with the athletes because the athletes can tell them can provide them with a lot of information about how they are adapting how they are coping how they are recovering and all of that is going to determine how they should taper for the competition yeah i mean literally the way that it works out in my coaching practice is as i use the two week is the standard right that's kind of the baseline anchor for the tape for the tapering time frame and the athletes who during a normal recovery cycle need that cycle to be longer right so let's just say normal recovery cycles five days or deloading phases five days if i have an athlete that needs seven days for whatever reason i'll make the taper longer or if i have an athlete

that needs a deeper recovery during the same time frame so let's just say we cut you know volume by 50 percent from a for a regular athlete during a normal deloading phase if i have an athlete that needs to cut at 80 percent i won't extend the taper but i'll reduce the volume by more because i recognize that pattern and training those are the individual responses that i'm that i'm typically going through as a basis to derive what we're actually doing during the taper because taper is like one time event like maybe you get two of them during a year but you don't have a lot of ends to to derive patterns from so you have to look at these surrogates essentially and using the recovery phases of the deloading phases of surrogates i always have thought has been quite informative yeah that's an excellent approach and um another uh thing we are looking into is does the level of fatigue of the athlete coming into the taper determine how you should taper that athlete so we are we are finding ways and in this case we are studying rugby players with uh with one of our PhD students so uh how we we we finding the way to measure or quantify the amount of fatigue that they carry into the taper and then we apply uh different

tapering strategies to see if we can come up with a same or a similar level of performance at the end of the taper even though they come into the taper with different levels of fatigue and another strategy we are testing is whether we can apply not only a taper but also additional recovery proactive recovery strategies to facilitate the recovery of those athletes who are coming into the taper with uh higher levels of fatigue so let's say an athlete comes into the taper with a level of fatigue i'm making up the numbers seven and another one comes to the taper with a level of fatigue of nine we would apply the same taper to both of them but the one who has a nine level of fatigue in addition to the taper will get uh contrast water therapy and and and compression garments and massage every other day and maybe applying the same taper but adding on top of that proactive recovery strategies might allow them to come to the same level of performance at the end of the taper because one of them is getting not only the recovery from the reduced training but also the recovery from those proactive uh recovery strategies that's interesting we are still looking into that yeah

that's interesting that the architecture of those two tapers would be exactly the same it's just the things that you're adding i mean literally the way that this shows up from a practical perspective to try to put to try to put some some realistic training framework on those level seven and level nine numbers if you think about this a lot of athletes will make their hardest training week the week immediately preceding the taper they have their in an ultra running world what happens is is they do their two longest runs the last two runs before they taper i think that's a bad strategy but uh first off i don't think that that you should have your highest acute training load at the same time you have your highest cumulative training load which would be at the end of the training phase that's a kind of another conversation but the person with fatigue level nine would be doing that and the person with fatigue level seven they're just kind of steady stating their training volume leading up into the taper and so i think the practical advice is if you end up in that in situation a that i mentioned where you've got those two last long runs the longest runs that you're going to ever do right before the taper it might be a good strategy not to change the architecture of the taper but to insert these adjunctive recovery modalities as a means of enhancing what's going on that that can be an option or another option is to do what you mentioned that that you usually do that maybe if an athlete needs extra recovery during the taper

instead of reducing by 60 percent you might reduce by 80 percent yeah that's a second option but the idea of um doing extra training or doing the highest training load in the lead up to the taper is it's not a stupid idea and it's something that is actually uh recommended to overreach an athlete it is it means walking in a fine line yeah between between it's it's risky but uh it but it might induce a higher level of functional overreaching that might end up giving you a higher level of super compensation if you get the taper right so when i was coaching uh elite triathletes i would do an ironman in particular i would do the highest load mesocycle and it was a shorter mesocycle of two weeks immediately before the taper so the two weeks prior to the taper were very very solid training because i wanted to to reach that um that overreaching state that would lead to a higher super compensation point providing provided that we got the taper right yeah i think that when you're looking at it on that lens when you're looking at it through a mesocycle

lens and your mesocycles are two weeks isn't that what you just said two weeks uh that particular one before the taper it was well my mesocycles were usually four weeks but the final the final two weeks of the uh of the pre-taper mesocycle were the ones with the highest load okay so but here's the crux of it and then this this is getting to satiate my own internal curiosity versus anything else i i've always looked at it as a mismatch as within that mesocycle and let's just let's just say it's four weeks right just because that's what most people are going to be used to you're gradually accumulating fatigue throughout that throughout those four weeks whenever you're putting the highest acute single session load at the end of that hot at the end of that fatigue accumulation phase that is that is a potential mismatch for catastrophe i might be overstating the the catastrophe part of it because you're combining the highest cumulative training load with the highest acute single session training load at the same time some athletes can handle that and some athletes as you mentioned can get a super compensation from those two things colliding at once but it's a really tricky thing to get right and not one that i normally like to like alchemize at this critical stage right before the race well what you are describing is uh what i usually call um doing the competition before the competition yeah exactly

uh that that that doesn't make any sense but and and and i don't i i can never um i can never make a recommendation about a particular training session because for me one particular training session means absolutely nothing unless i know what has been done before and what and what is coming after so very often i get a question by someone saying uh well uh last week i did a four hour bike ride is that good or bad that's just an example yeah exactly exactly well what's the length of my longest long run this is what we get in ultra running all the time what should the length of my longest long run be i'm like how can i answer that come on people yeah it's it's it doesn't mean anything an isolated training session means absolutely nothing it all depends on why you are doing it and when you are doing it and what you are trying to achieve and and for that you need to know what you've been doing before and what you plan to do after so doing this ultra hard session or ultra intense session at the end of a of a very high training load might mean that you are you know spending all your energy two weeks before the actual competition exactly but it you know it all depends on whether uh it makes sense to do that particular session within the framework of your training program so interesting we're we're gonna leave it there man maybe we can

bring you back on to go down that rabbit hole to discuss how we balance the aq and the chronic training loads within meso cycles because a lot of people have you know questions on that like should you do the hardest workout when you're the most fresh should you do the hardest workout when you're the most fatigued how can you combine the two for super compensation a little bit of it gets into nerdy training structure but i love that stuff man but we're gonna leave it there those of you that are going into races heed those words keep your training simple don't be afraid to back off the training load and the number one error that you can make is try to incorporate things that you haven't done in training beforehand um inigo thanks for coming on the podcast today it was really insightful i really appreciate it uh where can the listeners learn more about you or any of the work that you do well i have a i have a website called inigo mojica.com and they can follow me on twitter my twitter account is inigo mojica um how do you call it low dash underscore okay so my twitter account is inigo mojica underscore en for english because i have another account in basque language and spanish go give inigo a follow he's a great follow on twitter i've all i've learned a lot from just trolling you on twitter essentially it's great thank you and there you have it folks there you go much thanks to inigo for coming on the podcast

today i really enjoyed that conversation he's been somebody that i've wanted to get on the podcast for a long long time hopefully we can bring him back for more insight because as i mentioned from the onset he's one of the few people in the world that just has this incredible fusion of science and practice over many years of working with very high level athletes and a multitude of sports and it shows when he gives advice i hope you all appreciated this podcast and if you did head on over to apple podcasts and give this rate this podcast a rating or a review i appreciate all those rating and reviews that come in and they mean a lot to me personally and as always you guys that's it for today we will see you out on the trails