Just when you think they’d be training their hardest….

Red Blood CellsClick here to see the article at ctvolympics.ca.

So here we are, 30 days to go until the start of the Vancouver Olympics, and the athletes are all making their final preparations for the games. That means getting in lots of extra practice, hitting the gym to get just a bit stronger, maybe doing some additional cardio to make sure that you are totally fit – right? Actually, most athletes do the exact opposite.

For about 2-3 weeks before major competitions, athletes typically decrease the amount of training and practice they do - sometimes as much as 75%! During this period – called “tapering” - they rest and relax as much as they can.  In fact, a good friend of mine, Eddie Parenti - a captain of the Canadian Olympic swim team in the 90’s - would even refuse to walk up and down stairs before big meets.  And although it’s totally opposite to what you’d expect athletes to be doing, it works brilliantly to improve performance by 2-4% in a matter of weeks. This kind of improvement normally takes years to achieve if you keep training hard all the time.

 The biggest reason that tapering works is because, when resting, the body suddenly has all sorts of extra energy that it can spend fixing itself rather than fuelling exercise and training. So, when you drop off the training stress, the body figures that it has a bit of time to make itself stronger, faster, and fitter so that when it starts training again in the future, it will be able to handle it more easily. All sorts of amazing things happen inside the athletes’ body during taper.

One of the cool effects of tapering is an increase in the number of red blood cells that are in the blood. This helps carry more oxygen from the lungs to the muscles. So you feel like you’re suddenly able to exercise harder with less effort.

Athletes also experience increases in muscle strength and power. This is because the tiny fibres inside your muscles increase in size, especially the “fast-twitch” ones. So athletes get faster, more powerful, and can be more explosive in their sports – all just by resting and relaxing.

 There are a number of other effects that are pretty cool – decreased stress hormones, better sleep, and improved nerve – muscle communication. I’ll show these on CTV during the Olympic broadcasts.

Dr. Greg Wells will be a regular contributor on CTVOlympics.ca. Follow him throughout the Olympics at www.twitter.com/drgregwells.