Tapering without Tapering

This past weekend the US indoor championships took place at in Albuquerque and weight throwers A.G. Kruger and Amber Campbell defended their titles from 2011. While Campbell threw a personal best to place second in the Visa Championship Series, very few athletes actually performed at their best. Of the 18 competitors in the men’s and women’s weight throw, just 16% threw a personal best and only 27% registered a season’s best. The throwers underperformed compared to nearly every event group in an event where altitude should be to our advantage. For comparison, nearly half of the women’s jumpers registered a season’s or personal best.

Obviously every athlete tries to throw their best at a championship meet, especially when it represents perhaps the only chance for hammer throwers to earn prize money indoors. Since the indoor world championship does not have the weight throw, there is no other meet for post-collegiate throwers to focus on unless they skip indoors entirely and aim towards the Olympic Trials. It’s also obvious that not every thrower is at their best at any championship meet. This can be due to a lack of proper physical preparation (e.g. “peaking”), mental perpetration (e.g. nervousness), injury, poor technique, difficulty in traveling, or less than ideal meet conditions (e.g. a slow ring or early start time). But I think that a lack of understanding of periodization is often a big culprit.

The classic periodization model decreases volume, intensity, and technical work at the same time to reach a peak.

Many coaches believe that if you just need to shrink the volume and intensity to reach a peak. This is known as tapering and tapering alone will not give you big results. It is not a magic formula that breaks the glass ceiling holding you back. You have to have a plan to peak, and this plan does not even need to involve tapering.

I’ve often been asked how I taper my training during the competitive season and my response is that I don’t change the volume or intensity at all. Each individual workout remains the same. The excises Bondarchuk chooses will reflect those that have the best benefit to the particular athlete, but a workout in January will be just as long and intense as a workout in June. This is crucial for our training since we rely on a rhythm during our throws and during our training. Changing training drastically a few weeks before a major competition and starting something new can mess up the rhythm. Personally I feel sluggish if I am not throwing nearly every day. So, we keep doing what we always do and time my most important competition to when I will fully adapt to my most beneficial exercises.

While this idea may seem novel, it is actually used by some of the world’s best coaches. For example, Dan Pfaff provided a perfect explanation of the technique in the third part of a 2008 interview with Athletics Weekly. Dan Pfaff has to be one of the most widely successful athletics coaches in history, guiding athletes to world records in the 100m (Donovan Bailey) and American records in such diverse events at the pole vault (Brad Walker) and discus (Suzy Powell).

During our “taper period” we do quite a bit of work and we probably work a little harder and at a higher intensity than a lot of people might, but our athletes are conditioned and they need that amount of work to maintain the various strengths they have developed.

If I had to define our taper, I would say that the volume and intensity stay fairly similar, but density decreases . . . how often you work on a quality in a given time frame.

We also decrease our density, but almost by accident. When you have a competition, the density automatically decreases. With one meet day, one pre-meet day, and perhaps one rest day, the amount of practices in the week is falls on its own. Over the course of the two month long competition season, that is more than enough extra rest to give me the extra boost I need to peak. Other plans may involve more of a taper than mine, but it is the sound plan (and not just the taper) that will produce the results.