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The pooled evidence supports 41–60%.
Held constant across the taper. Fewer, longer sessions is not the same taper.
30 km
Down 50% on your last full week, across 2 weeks.
Volume falls on a decay curve, not a cliff and not a straight line: each week keeps the same fraction of the one before it, landing exactly on your chosen cut in race week. That shape and that range come from Bosquet, Montpetit, Arvisais and Mujika, “Effects of tapering on performance: a meta-analysis”, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 2007;39(8):1358–1365, which pooled 27 studies and found a two-week taper with volume cut exponentially by 41–60% the most efficient arrangement. Mujika and Padilla, “Scientific bases for precompetition tapering strategies”, same journal 2003;35(7):1182–1187, found progressive tapers beat step tapers, which is why nothing here drops in one jump.
Only the mileage comes down. Intensity stays exactly where it was — the same intervals at the same speeds, just fewer of them — and so does the number of times a week you train, because both papers hold those two constant while cutting volume. A taper that turns hard days easy is a rest week, and it is not what any of this was measured on. Nor is it a training plan: it is one number, weekly volume, scheduled downwards, and it knows nothing about your race, your history or your legs.
Hard training makes you fitter and tires you out at the same time, and on race day only one of those is any use. A taper is the deliberate business of shedding the second without losing the first: cut the accumulated fatigue, keep the adaptations. Across the research, athletes who taper properly turn up around three per cent faster, which over a marathon is roughly seven minutes and over four kilometres of rowing is a boat length or several.
A 2007 meta-analysis in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise pooled twenty-seven studies of tapering and looked at what separated the ones that worked. The answer was a two-week taper in which training volume comes down by somewhere between forty-one and sixty per cent. That is the range this planner defaults into, and the tool says so plainly when you push it outside.
Sixty per cent of your mileage is a frightening amount to give up, and giving up less is the more common mistake. The evidence is fairly clear that a timid taper leaves fatigue on the table.
There are two ways to remove half your training. You can drop to the reduced figure on day one and hold it, or you can come down progressively across the weeks. Compared side by side, the progressive version wins, and the reduction in the studies that worked was exponential rather than linear — each week keeps a constant fraction of the week before, so the early cut is large and the last one is small. That is the curve this planner builds, and it lands precisely on your chosen figure in race week.
Badly, for a while. Reduced volume commonly brings heavy legs, poor sleep, phantom niggles and a conviction that all the fitness has drained away, and none of that is evidence that the taper is failing. Freshness has a habit of arriving late, sometimes only in the last two or three days.
The reliable mistake is reacting to that feeling by adding a session back. The plan was written when you were thinking clearly, which was the point of writing it down, and the week before a race is the worst possible moment to renegotiate it.
Intensity stays. The same intervals at the same speeds, the same efforts on the same hills — there are simply fewer of them, and the sessions are shorter. Frequency stays too: if you trained six days a week, you still train six days a week, because dropping to three turns a taper into a layoff.
This matters more than the exact percentage. Volume down, intensity and frequency untouched, is the arrangement that was actually measured. Softening the hard days as well is a different intervention, and it has a habit of leaving people flat rather than sharp.
Endurance adaptations are slow to fade and take considerably longer than three weeks to unwind, particularly when hard efforts are still in the plan. What people feel in taper week is usually unfamiliarity with being rested, not lost fitness.
Yes, since it is a large share of weekly volume, and shrinking everything proportionally is the simplest way to hit the target. Keeping one enormous run inside a taper week defeats the purpose of the week.
Two came out best in the pooled data, and it is the sensible default for a marathon or a long triathlon. One week suits shorter events and smaller training loads, where there is less accumulated fatigue to shed in the first place.
The studies covered swimmers, cyclists, rowers and runners alike, and the findings held across them. That is why this planner takes hours as readily as kilometres or miles, so a swimmer can plan in the units they actually train in.