At the 2019 World Championships, Caeleb Dressel put on an absolute clinic in one of the greatest performances in the history of the sport.
Six gold medals. Two silvers. A world record in the 100 butterfly. And what was at the time the fastest 50m freestyle ever swum in a textile suit—a blistering 21.04.
You’d assume a meet like that felt effortless. Amazing. That he spent taper slicing the pool in half and making the lane ropes creak.
Nope. Dressel felt lousy in the water all week.
“One of my worst feeling meets as a whole was 2019 Worlds and I went a best time in every event,” Dressel said. “It’s not about feel. Sometimes, you just have to get up and race.”
Two years later, at US Olympic Trials, he qualified for the team in seven different events—including the 50 freestyle, where he again swam a 21.04.
And again, the taper felt terrible.
A week out from the meet, he had one of the worst workouts he’d ever had in the pool.
“I’m trying not to get nervous but it’s the same thing every year,” Dressel said in an interview with Inside with Brett Hawke. “You don’t want to be going trash times a week out from when you are supposed to be racing. And that’s when you have to fall back on what you’ve been doing in training that year, trusting in the coaches.”
If one of the best sprinters on the planet struggles with the yo-yo of tapering every single season, you’re in good company. After all, the changes happening in taper tend to happen before we necessarily feel faster in the water.
Here’s why.
- For swimmers looking for a more complete guide to tapering, including how long to taper, how much volume to cut and so on, read this article: Taper in Swimming – How to Peak and Race Fast.
Fast-Twitch Fibers Are Recovering (Even If You Can’t Feel It Yet)
Tapering benefits swimmers from the sprint lane to the distance lane, but the sprinter is the athlete that is most sensitive to the benefits of tapering.
The reason is under that overpriced tech suit and freshly shaved skin in your muscle fibers. Fast twitch fibers—5-8x more powerful than slow-twitch muscle fibers—respond most dramatically to tapering.
Months of hard training and accumulated fatigue suppress fast twitch function faster than it can recover. Taper gives them the space and time to bounce back, and they so at an “alarmingly fast rate” (Murach and Bagley, 2015).
How “alarming” and how fast?
A study (Trappe et al., 2000) with swimmers biopsied the delts of swimmers before and after a three-week taper and found:
- Fast-twitch fiber diameter: +11%
- Fast-twitch peak force: +30%
- Fast-twitch shortening velocity: +67%
- Fast-twitch absolute power: +150%
Along with all that twitchy-twitchy boom-boom, swim performance improved by 4%.
During training, sprinters work hard. But all of those sets on the rack, potentiation clusters, and heavy lifting in the gym can leave you feeling a little sluggish and slow during the overload block.
Taper is designed to unshackle you from this fatigue so that you can swim crispy and fast, and the changes are happening inside the muscle long before they necessarily show up in the water.
Power Goes Out First
Detraining is one of the biggest fears that swimmers have during the taper process, and it’s one of the reasons that when swimmers were surveyed how long they preferred to taper, they somewhat counter-intuitively lean towards shorter tapers.
Endurance and strength take a long time to decay with complete cessation, and a well-designed taper actually promotes them. But power is more fragile and fades faster than max strength.
A study with trained athletes (Izquierdo et al., 2007) compared four weeks of complete rest against a proper taper following a 16-week training block. The complete rest group lost 6-9% of their strength, but 14-17% of their power.
The taper group? Strength ticked up slightly and power was fully maintained.
Power fades faster than strength. And nearly everything that makes a sprint fast is power dominant.
- Making the block rattle with an explosive start
- Thundering dolphin kicks to the surface
- Producing near-peak power in each stroke cycle for the duration of a race
Protecting power during the taper is essential for the sprint swimmer. Reduce overall training volume, but not intensity.
Why Sprint Tapers Mess with Your Head
Dressel’s experience with feeling flat and the taper blues is surprisingly normal when you understand the psychological part of tapering.
When taper kicks off, our mood states begin to improve. Quickly, for some swimmers, a little longer for others. But there is one big exception—tension. It remains high and can even climb as competition approaches (Raglin et al., 1991).
What’s that about?
During hard training you are getting after it every day, white-knuckling the main sets, pushing limits, and pushing your body. All your mental energy goes to getting after it in practice.
Once the hard work is behind you, the attention shifts to competition.
Am I ready? Did I do enough training to justify ambitious goals for the Big Meet? What if all this hard work doesn’t pay off?
For sprinters, this tension is thicker. Races are incredibly short, mistakes are amplified, and there is not a lot of room to recover from a sloppy breakout or inhaling a mouthful of pool water on your first breath of the race.
To keep the tension and pre-competition anxiety under control as taper unwinds, focus on execution and showing up each day.
There will be days where you feel flat at practice—but showing yourself that you can still swim at a high level regardless is evidence that you can do the same if you feel flat during one of the sessions at the meet.
You Don’t Have to Feel Fast to Sprint Fast
The recovery process during taper isn’t as clear as swimmers hope it to be. While muscle soreness can resolve fairly quickly—usually by the end of the weekend—muscle power, readiness, mood, and the “jets on the feet” feeling can take time.
Here’s an example.
Ribeiro et al. (2022) had swimmers do a 6-week overload block focused on high-intensity interval training followed by a two-week taper. The taper worked—swimmers improved 100 freestyle time trial performance by ~2.2%. Great success.
But when researchers compared leg muscle activation after the taper and from before the training block, the taper didn’t totally fully “recover” the legs. Muscle activation was still down 10-15% even though performance jumped.
Swimmers can feel flat, a little heavy, or like you’re missing the explosiveness that you expect in training, but it doesn’t automatically mean the taper is busted or that you’re going to swim slow.
It’s possible to still be carrying some fatigue in your muscles—and even feel “trash”—and still race well, because tapering did the heavy lifting of keeping power from falling off a cliff.
Legendary Texas coach Eddie Reese on the recovery process during taper:
- “Swimmers will feel terrible for the first little while, but it takes two to three weeks for the muscular system to recover and five to six weeks for the nervous system.”
Wrapping Things Up
Dressel’s Worlds and Olympic experiences are a reminder that the tapering isn’t always supposed to feel great and effortless. You’ll have those moments where it feels like you’re swimming with grandma’s wool sweater on your back.
Even the greats struggle through the same dips in performance and feeling, doubt, and garbagio taper sessions.
Cut volume, keep genuine speed in the water, give those explosive efforts in training lots of rest, and let those fast-twitch fibers come back to life.
When race day comes, and you still feel a little off, take a breath, remind yourself that you’ve done the hard work, and get up and race anyway.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national-level swimmer, 2x Olympic Trials qualifier, and author of several books for swimmers, including YourSwimBook, Conquer the Pool, and Tapering for Sprint Freestylers.
The book is a 98-page eBook packed with actionable insights and research into what makes an explosive taper unfold on schedule. Everything from duration to taper type to managing your dryland to navigating the mental ups and downs of tapering for sprinters.
Tapering for Sprint Freestylers combines evidence-based insights with a collection of 15 ready-to-go sets (plus the “regular” versions to better understand how they scale down), a Taper Blueprint to plan your taper like a pro, and a 12-week sample resisted sprint program to show you how all the principles come together.
No more guesswork or hoping for taper miracles.
Show up on race day explosive, fast, and dangerous.
👉👉👉 Learn more about Tapering for Sprint Freestylers
