What should you do the day before a match or a race?
Train short and easy, or take the day off. Drop the volume, and keep whatever intensity you would normally use, because cutting intensity is what costs you performance. A hard session the day before leaves fatigue that has not cleared by the time it matters.
Cut volume, keep intensity
This is the most consistent finding in the taper literature. A 2007 meta-analysis by Bosquet and colleagues found that performance improves when training volume falls substantially in the days before competition while intensity and frequency are maintained. Work by Mujika and Padilla reaches the same conclusion. The instinct to go easy on everything is the wrong half: dropping intensity is associated with losing the sharpness you spent the block building.
Why the day before is its own question
A taper is about the week. The day before is about fatigue that has not had time to clear. Even a session that fits the week perfectly can leave you flat if it lands twenty four hours out, which is why most practical guidance treats the eve of a competition as short, easy, or off, whatever the rest of the taper looks like.
What a short session the day before can do
Some athletes feel better for a brief, sharp session the day before, often called a primer: a short warm up and a few efforts at race pace or faster, with long rests and very little total work. The aim is to feel switched on rather than to train. If you have never done one before a competition, the day before a competition you care about is not the day to try it.
Sleep is the part most people skip
One poor night before an event has a smaller effect than a week of poor nights, so the night two nights before is worth protecting as much as the last one. Travel, a late finish, and an unfamiliar bed all land on the same night, and none of them show up in a training plan.
In Peakly
Mark a day as a target day and Peakly will not put a hard session on the day before it. That is a rule the planner enforces, not advice in the prompt: a hard session proposed for that day is removed before you ever see it.
See how Peakly plans a weekSources
- Bosquet and colleagues, 2007 meta-analysis of tapering and performance
- Mujika and Padilla, on taper volume, intensity and frequency