2025 Thoughts on Tapering for Racing

We had a program planning discussion as well as a rower workshop in my July consulting visit with the Craftsbury GRP teams. Here are my notes from part of that discussion on strength training taper strategies for three common rowing racing situations. Part 2 coming next will have some periodization discussion.

As with most things, choosing the best taper strategy depends on your goals.

For-Fun Race: No need to taper. We can treat racing like an intensity training session. On the GRP, this describes most races that aren’t for national team selection, prize money, or world-level medals. For example, Canadian Henley is a great for-fun racing event usually done with little or no taper. For most other rowers (eg. junior, club, college, masters, etc.), a for-fun race is usually those other than regional or national level. Go race, have fun, practice racing, and know that you could probably do 1-5% better with a taper when there’s a higher priority event.

I prefer to get both weekly sessions in, but it’s okay if we need to drop the final strength training session before racing due to travel, trailer-loading, etc. We’ve also made it an “on-your-own” session to be done at a flexible time. I consider this is a schedule adjustment, not a taper.

When we can get the second session in, I avoid strength training in the 72 hours prior to racing that would cause significant soreness. We don’t make significant changes in exercises or set/rep scheme or train close to failure (RPE9-10). That said, researchers in two studies (2011 and 2016) showed that rowers can perform pretty close (~2 seconds slower) to baseline in a 2km erg just 24 and 48 hours following an intense strength training session. If you want to take that second session hard, go for it and accept the slight decrease in performance. See my “In-Season Strength Training” article for details.

Mid-Level Race: A short week-of taper. This is a race that is important, but not a peak performance. This also might include erg testing or seat-racing, depending on the circumstances. The goal is to feel fresh, rested, and powerful on race day, but without giving up as much training time as is needed to achieve a true peak. We assume we are performing close to or slightly above our trained baseline.

Decrease strength training volume for the first weekly session on the Monday or Tuesday before weekend racing, but keep the intensity high. We’ll do full explosive intent power training, such as 3-5 sets of 2-3 reps on our A-series main work exercises (squat, deadlift, overhead push press). For B-series assistance work, do 2-3 working sets of 5-8 reps, and then 1-2 sets of 8-12 on any C-series shoulder, hip, and core minor exercises.

Take the second day of strength training off. If you really want to lift, do just 2-3 sets of 2-3 reps with full explosive intent on the main work exercises and 1 working set of 5-8 reps on assistance work. If we don’t take time off after racing and get right back to it in the following week, I find that rowers can normally return to their pre-taper training load without adjustment.

Peak Race: A full two-week taper. If the rowing taper is really severe with a big period of intentional overreaching before the recovery period, I’ll go to a three-week taper to stay ahead of that. I’m careful to not double-down on the rowing overreach with the strength training overreach. I work to stay about a week ahead of the rowing timeline, so that our strength training fatigue is starting to come down before the rowing training fatigue is at its peak (overreaching) before declining (recovery/supercompensation).

The longer taper timeline allows us to decrease fatigue more and more gradually for more recovery and, ideally, a bigger peak. However, this costs us a significant amount of training time. We decrease training load over two weeks, take a week off while racing, often take a week off after racing, so I’ll plan to build that load back over another three or four weeks after racing. That’s five or six total weeks of reduced training load, so the race needs to be important enough to be worth that cost. This answers the common question of why we don’t peak to be at our absolute best for every race.

I’ll write this two-week taper outline as though we’re doing two full-body strength training sessions per week. This is what I do with most in-season rowers preparing for a peak race. If you’ve been doing three sessions per week, I suggest reducing to two at this point for more recovery.

• 4 sessions out: A full two weeks away from racing, decrease volume by reducing 1-2 work sets of each exercise. If we’re doing alternating sessions of strength focus and power focus in the main work, this session is our final strength focus day.
• 3 sessions out: Power-focused full explosive intent training, one set fewer than the prior session. Main work is usually 3 sets of 2-3 reps for full explosive intent squat or deadlift. If you’ve been doing 3-4 sets of assistance work before this week, you did 2-3 sets in the prior session and just 1-2 sets in this session.
• 2 sessions out: Very short and low volume training session on the Monday or Tuesday before racing. This should be done in 30 minutes total, including warmup. Just 1-2 working sets of 2-3 reps in the main work squat or deadlift for full explosive intent, just 1 set of 5-8 reps on assistance work, and 0-1 sets of minor shoulder, hip, and core. Many rowers are tempted to skip this session, resenting spending just 20-30 minutes in the gym, but I find it worthwhile and recommend getting it done.
• 1 session out: If racing begins on a Sunday or Monday, such as a full week of international racing beginning with time trials, then we can repeat the prior session on a Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday (before the following Sunday/Monday start of racing) and feel good about hitting full recovery. If racing happens over a weekend, such as Friday heats, Saturday semis, Sunday finals, or racing multiple entries over a weekend, then we’ll just skip this session. There’s usually trailer loading or travel that has to happen for a major race anyway. We don’t want a low-quality strength training session rushed or crammed into a tight schedule or done immediately before sitting down to travel for long periods. I always recommend doing movements from my full-body warmup series during travel or at the end of the travel day. The deep squat progression alone is a simple go-to for staying loose.
• After racing: Rebuild training load over two or three weeks after racing. After a peak event, rowers will commonly (and should) take a week off (or more) from all training or very reduced training load for recovery. This counts as another week (or more) of reduced load. Stick to the one-to-one ratio of reduced load to rebuilding time, even when healthy. If we did 2 weeks tapering, 1 week off for racing, and 1 week off for recovering from racing, we’d spend 4 weeks rebuilding combined strength and rowing training load. Faster is possible, but also riskier.