Taper

A taper is the progressive reduction in training load in the days and weeks before a goal event, designed to shed accumulated fatigue while holding on to the fitness you built. The winning combination, well established in the literature, is to cut volume substantially — roughly 40–60% — while keeping intensity and frequency high, over about one to three weeks. Done right, it converts hidden fitness into fresh legs, typically worth a couple of percent of performance.

Taper recipe (per Bosquet et al. meta-analysis):
    Volume    — ↓ ~40–60%
    Intensity — hold (keep the hard efforts)
    Frequency — hold (don't stop riding)
    Duration  — ~1–3 weeks; progressive (exponential) decay works best
    Result    — ~2–3% mean performance gain

Bosquet and colleagues' meta-analysis of taper studies found the most effective approach is a progressive (exponential) reduction of training volume of roughly 40–60%, maintaining intensity and frequency, over about two weeks, yielding on the order of a 2–3% improvement in performance — a large margin at the sharp end of a race. The critical, counter-intuitive point is that you cut volume, not intensity. Dropping the hard efforts detrains you; dropping the volume is what actually removes the fatigue.

The mechanism lives in the fitness/fatigue framework, where performance is fitness (CTL) minus fatigue (ATL). Because fatigue decays faster than fitness (a 7-day versus a 42-day time constant), reducing load lets ATL fall quickly while CTL barely moves — so form (TSB) rises. The taper is engineered to land TSB in a fresh-but-not-flat window on race day, commonly around +15 to +25 for an A-race, while preserving as much CTL as possible.

Taper length scales with the block that preceded it and the event itself — a big endurance build needs longer than a weekend criterium. The classic errors are tapering too hard (going fully easy, losing sharpness and feeling sluggish), tapering too long (fitness starts to decay), and doing nothing at all (racing buried in fatigue). Keeping short, sharp efforts — openers — through the taper preserves neuromuscular feel without adding meaningful fatigue.