How To Taper Into The Off-Season

The transition period at the end of race season should be seen as a training block, but most riders treat it as an absence of one.

With race season coming to an end, a lot of riders are now looking towards the off season. A time to cut pack on structured training, ride for fun or hang the wheels up and cross train. Other riders never stop at all, they roll straight from the season into "base miles" without a break, and spends the following summer flat, irritable, and slower than they were a year ago.

Both of these approaches are a mistake, both treat the end of the season as a thing that happens to you rather than a thing you plan. Sports science has a name for the block between competition and preparation: The Transition Period. It's the third phase of the annual cycle, it has its own physiology, and there's now enough evidence to say precisely how to approach it.

The short version: you should let your fitness fall. You just shouldn't let it freefall.

Fitness is made of different systems that decline at different rates

When training stops, you don't lose fitness at a constant rate - you lose two different things on two different timescales and confusing them is why riders panic in week one and get complacent by week five.

The first system is fast and largely reversible. Within days of stopping, blood volume drops. Coyle et al demonstrated that the early decline in cardiovascular response to exercise after detraining is substantially explained by this blood volume loss, not by any deeper structural change¹. Plasma volume rebounds quickly once riding resumes. So the alarming VO2max dip you'd measure after ten days off is, to a large degree, a hydration artefact masquerading as a physiology change.

The second part is slower and it's the one that matters. In their two-part review for Sports Medicine, Mujika and Padilla separate short-term detraining (under four weeks) from long-term (over four weeks)². Beyond about a month, the losses stop being quickly reversible structural changes start to appear: reduced cardiac dimensions, lower stroke volume and cardiac output, muscle glycogen begins to drop toward baseline, lactate threshold drops, and a decline in oxidative fibre proportion³. Critically, they note that recently acquired VO2max gains are lost completely – detraining from your peak fitness will have the greatest slide in performance.

Realistically after total cessation of training, VO2max can drop by around 7–11% after three to five weeks in trained athletes⁴.

Are base miles overrated?

Controversial here, but the science backs it up. If there's one finding to build your off-season around, it's this: keep the intensity, drop the volume.

Mujika and Padilla put it plainly in their review of long-term detraining - the negative effects can be limited by reduced training load, as long as training intensity is maintained and frequency is reduced only moderately. Training volume, by contrast, can be cut markedly³.

The cycling-specific test of this is unusually clean. Rønnestad, Askestad and Hansen took well-trained cyclists through an eight-week transition period following their race season. One group did low-intensity training only. The other did the same low-intensity work but added a single high-intensity session every 7–10 days. The difference wasn't subtle: the group doing one hard session a fortnight showed a substantially better outcome in power output at 4 mmol/L blood lactate, both immediately after the transition period and into the next season as well⁶.

One session every week to ten days. That's the whole intervention. It's a rounding error in training time and it changes where you start in January.

A lighter option

There's a fair objection to the above: the transition period exists partly for mental recovery, and asking a rider who's just finished a hundred race days to do threshold intervals in October is asking them to quit the sport.

Almquist et al tested a gentler version. Sixteen elite cyclists (VO2max 72 ml/kg/min) cut training load by roughly 60% for three weeks from the end of the race season. One group did low-intensity riding only; the other added 30-second sprints to a single low-intensity session per week. The sprint group improved sprint performance and maintained 20-minute all-out power and fractional utilisation of VO2max - and did so, the researchers noted, without compromising mental recovery as measured by burnout questionnaire⁷.

A handful of thirty-second efforts dropped into an easy ride – like town sign sprints can have a notable impact on your form for no real perceived physical or mental exertion.

Four-week transition

None of the studies above tested this exact schedule - it's an application of their findings, and something I have use too in the past – although without knowing it. This strategy is well supported by the research.

Week 1 - Stop. Properly. No structure, no targets, no bike if you don't want it. This is the week that pays for the season and it's the one most riders skip because it can feel like wasting all the hard work you put in to get to where you are. Your form will drop fast, but almost everything you lose here is plasma volume and it comes back within days.

Week 2 - Move, don't train. Whatever you like. Walk, run, swim, ride the mountain bike badly. No power meter. The goal is unstructured activity that keeps some stimulus in the system without asking anything of you psychologically.

Week 3 - Reintroduce one hard thing. Either a single high-intensity session, or the softer option, a few 30-second sprints inside an otherwise easy ride. Volume stays low. This is the point where the maintenance evidence starts earning its keep.

Week 4 - Set the winter pattern. Low volume, one bit of intensity every 7–10 days. Hold this until you're ready to start building. It costs almost nothing and it's the difference between beginning your preparation phase from your September fitness and beginning it from a hole.

Then stop tapering and start building. Somewhere around week four to six, the transition period is over, and the question changes from “How do I not go backwards?” to “How do I go forwards?"

What is the actual opint of the off season

The reason to run the transition properly isn't damage limitation. It's that a well-executed off-season hands you a stretch of months where nothing is at stake. This is a great time to try new things. Do some skills training, try new nutrition strategies etc. Almost every intervention worth doing is one you can't attempt during the season, because it could go wrong.

Heat training is the clearest example. Five weeks of structured heat exposure in a hot bath has been shown to raise haemoglobin mass in elite cyclists by roughly 3.5–4%⁸, and three weekly heat sessions were enough to preserve altitude-gained Hb mass in elite riders while a control group lost 3.3%⁹. Those sessions are unpleasant and flattening. In April, that's unaffordable. In November, it's free.

The same logic applies to strength work - a 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis found heavy strength training improves cycling efficiency, anaerobic capacity and time-trial performance in endurance cyclists, though notably not VO2max¹⁰. It applies to gut training, which needs a ten-week uninterrupted ramp. It applies to changing your position, which takes months of riding before it's repeatable under fatigue.

So use this time wisely to focus on things you can’t prioritise in season. Take the break but plan it out and know when it’s over. Keep one hard thing in the week.

If you do it well, you will come back into 2027 fitter, stronger and more dialled in than ever before.

References

1. Coyle EF, Hemmert MK, Coggan AR. "Effects of detraining on cardiovascular responses to exercise: role of blood volume." Journal of Applied Physiology. 1986;60(1):95–99.
2. Mujika I, Padilla S. "Detraining: Loss of Training-Induced Physiological and Performance Adaptations. Part I: Short-term insufficient training stimulus." Sports Medicine. 2000;30(2):79–87.
3. Mujika I, Padilla S. "Detraining: Loss of training-induced physiological and performance adaptations. Part II: Long-term insufficient training stimulus." Sports Medicine. 2000;30(3):145–154.
4. Figure cited in: Almquist NW, Løvlien I, Byrkjedal PT, Spencer M, Kristoffersen M, Skovereng K, Sandbakk Ø, Rønnestad BR. Frontiers in Physiology. 2020;11:1000 — referencing Coyle et al. (1984) and Maldonado-Martín et al. (2017).
5. Maldonado-Martín S, Cámara J, James DVB, et al. "Effects of long-term training cessation in young top-level road cyclists." Journal of Sports Sciences. 2017;35(14):1396–1401.
6. Rønnestad BR, Askestad A, Hansen J. "HIT maintains performance during the transition period and improves next season performance in well-trained cyclists." European Journal of Applied Physiology. 2014;114(9):1831–1839.
7. Almquist NW, Løvlien I, Byrkjedal PT, Spencer M, Kristoffersen M, Skovereng K, Sandbakk Ø, Rønnestad BR. "Effects of Including Sprints in One Weekly Low-Intensity Training Session During the Transition Period of Elite Cyclists." Frontiers in Physiology.
8. Rønnestad BR, et al. "Hematological, skeletal muscle fiber, and exercise performance adaptations to heat training in elite female and male cyclists." Journal of Applied Physiology.
9. Rønnestad BR, Odden I, Urianstad T, Hansen J, Mølmen KS, Cardinale DA. "Heat Suit Training Preserves the Increased Hemoglobin Mass after Altitude Camp in Elite Cyclists." Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. 2025;57(1):81–87.
10. Llanos-Lagos C, Ramirez-Campillo R, Sáez de Villarreal E. "Heavy strength training effects on physiological determinants of endurance cyclist performance: a systematic review with meta-analysis." European Journal of Applied Physiology. 2026;126(1):193–222.