500 Words a Week - Tapering for the end of the season

As we approach the end of the season, our training goals and priorities have changed. In the last 3-4 weeks of the season, it is hard to see further increases in physical qualities from doing more. However, by performing a taper and dissipating any accumulated fatigue over the season will allow for an increase in physical parameters. What is very easy to do in this 3-4-week period is decrease our athlete’s physical qualities and hinder their recovery capacities. This is could be expanded to strength and conditioning in general. If we think about hammering a nail into a wall, the nail doesn’t require many hits of the hammer to be fixed in the wall. We could keep hitting the nail to further secure its place in the wall. However, the further we hit the nail into the wall the bigger chance we have of damaging the wall. This is replicable to imparting a strength stimulus into our athletes, we can do a little to impart a sufficient stimulus, however we can easily get carried away and keep hitting the nail. Before we know it, we are hammering the wall rather than the nail.

With this in mind, our main lift has changed to a quarter squat, encouraging our athletes to be as explosive in the concentric phase. We will encourage some extension through the ankle joint. The shorter range of motion, decreases the level of eccentric loading on our athletes. Again, our goal is to reduce fatigue as much as possible while imparting some form of stimulus and keeping intent high.

However, we still want to ensure our athletes receive some form of stimulus in deep ranges of motion to keep tissues and tendons happy and healthy. We achieve this by supplementing our quarter squat with a split squat iso hold. The isometric nature of this exercise means very limited muscle damage, but I believe gives a sufficient stimulus to keep some form of tissue and tendon strength.

We have still kept an element of choice within our programme, if athletes want to continue with what we were doing before, that’s fine by me. They understand their own bodies and how they respond to certain exercises/ lifts better than me. This goes with one of the main goals in trying to have our athletes play a part in the training process and have some ownership. Our main focus is happy and healthy athletes during this time. Especially when the games being played have a significant importance.

The majority of our other work has remained the same, but the volume has been reduced. As with above, we still give our athletes the option to do the usual volume if they want to or have other goals they’d like to hit.