The Taper

For a swimmer taper is the most wonderful time of the year. Taper is the point in the season where the amount of yardage the swimmer is swimming starts to go down. The practices shift to shorter sprint sets with lots of rest and a focus on race specific details. If you are around swimmers who are going through taper you will notice a sudden increase in the amount of energy they have compared to the rest of the season where they may have been in a constant state of fatigue.

Throughout the entire swim season swimmers will have two-a-day workouts until taper starts this means there are a lot of very early mornings for swimmers throughout most of the year. As a swimmer the morning workouts I have taken part in would consist of dryland and lifting, along with a shorter pool swim. Dryland is a term used in swimming for workouts performed out of the pool. For me these workouts were often composed of some type of circuit training where there are different stations set up and at each station there are different exercises you perform. The morning workouts usually happen anywhere from three to four times a week. The main swim workouts happen every afternoon, this is where the bulk of the swimming yardage is put in throughout the season. 

There are different styles of training for swimming, some programs will focus on swimming lots of yards, while others will swim less yards at a higher intensity. From my experience there has been a shift from the programs that use lots of yardage to the programs focused on high intensity training. The high intensity training allows for more race specific details to be practiced whereas swimming lots of yardage will create a large aerobic base. I prefer the high intensity style of training. I think the high intensity training teaches you how to swim fast, and considering most of the races in swimming are 200 yards or less you do not need to train where you swim close to 10,000 yards in a day. The high intensity training also gives you a good benchmark for how fast you will swim once taper comes and you are rested. The yardage training offers an unpredictable taper performance and the outcome varies greatly from person to person.

Taper is a time where swimmers become loaded up with energy and it can be difficult to contain, but don't be surprised if you here a swimmer making an excuse to not do something because they are on taper and do not want to over exert themselves. A joke used quite often among swimmers is when they say a random activity will ruin their taper. Taper is a time of high spirit and lots of excitement on the pool deck, it is a time every swimmer looks forward to and it often marks the end of a season full of hard work and dedication.