Tapering for a Tennis Tournament

Most adults tapering for a tournament do too much. The decision logic feels honest — “I have one shot at this, I should not lose any fitness in the final two weeks” — and the result is consistent. They arrive at the first round flat, heavy-legged, half a step slow, and they lose to opponents they would normally beat. The science on tapering in racquet sports is genuinely well-developed at this point, and the answer it gives is uncomfortable: cut the work. Cut more of it than feels right.

What tapering is actually doing

A taper is the deliberate reduction in training load before competition with the aim of arriving at the start line — or for tennis, the first serve — with peak fitness expressed and accumulated fatigue dissipated. The two states sit on the same continuum. Training raises fitness; it also raises fatigue. Performance is, roughly, fitness minus fatigue (Banister et al., 1975). During a normal training block, both rise together and the player works through the fatigue. In a taper, the goal is to hold fitness as constant as possible while letting fatigue drop. The performance line then rises sharply at the end of the taper window.

The biology underneath this is what makes the prescription counterintuitive. Fitness adaptations — mitochondrial density, capillarization, neural drive, motor unit recruitment — decay slowly. Even three weeks of zero training only reduces VO2max by roughly four to six percent in trained athletes. Fatigue adaptations — muscle damage, glycogen depletion, central nervous system load — recover quickly. In ten days, almost all accumulated fatigue from a well-designed training block is gone. The window between “still fit” and “no longer fatigued” is the window the taper exploits.

The number that comes out of the racquet sport literature, fairly consistently, is a 40 to 60 percent reduction in training volume over the final two weeks before a peak event, with intensity held high or slightly elevated, and the duration of high-intensity efforts shortened (Mujika and Padilla, 2003; Bosquet et al., 2007). Volume falls. Intensity does not. This is the inversion most adult players cannot bring themselves to do.

The standard two-week taper

The model I run with the adult competitive players I coach at Beykoz, for a single priority event, is a two-week taper. Long enough for fatigue to dissipate. Short enough that the player is still psychologically connected to playing.

Week one of the taper: cut training volume by roughly 25 to 30 percent. Sessions stay roughly the same number per week — three to five — but each session is 20 to 30 percent shorter. Intensity stays high. Drilling stays sharp. Off-court strength work drops to one short session of low-volume, high-quality lifting. Conditioning sessions are shorter and faster — fewer intervals, but those intervals are at high quality.

Week two: cut training volume by another 30 to 40 percent from the original baseline, so total volume in the final week is roughly 40 to 50 percent of normal. Sessions become very short — 45 minutes to an hour — and very specific. Mostly match play, mostly at high intensity. The off-court work drops to nearly zero — perhaps one short mobility session, no real strength work, no conditioning intervals.

The day before the event: a short session, no more than 45 minutes, with a focus on serve and return rhythm. Some movement. Some short points. Nothing tactical. Nothing that will produce a sleep-disrupting muscle soreness. The aim is to walk off the court feeling like you could have done more. That is the right feeling.

What stays the same, what drops

The single most useful framing for tapering decisions is to ask, for each training element: does this element produce fatigue that lasts more than 72 hours, or fitness that decays in less than 14 days? If it produces long-lasting fatigue and rapid-decay fitness — long endurance runs, high-volume strength training, long conditioning circuits — drop it during the taper. If it produces short-lived fatigue and slow-decay fitness — serve practice, short live-ball drills, technique work, very short sprints — keep it.

What stays: serve practice. Return practice. Short drills. Match-intensity sets. Quality over quantity. What drops: long aerobic conditioning. Sets-and-reps strength volume. Long live-hitting drills above 90 minutes. Tactical drills that primarily test patience rather than execution. New technical work — anything you are still learning is not going to be ready for the tournament; trying to finish learning it in week two of the taper produces fatigue without performance gain.

The temptation to “fix that one thing” in the final two weeks is hard to resist, and is almost always a mistake. Players who consistently arrive at tournaments in good shape have learned to accept that whatever is in the game on taper day is what will play in the tournament. The technical improvement project goes back into the schedule after the event.

The mental component

The hardest part of tapering for adults is psychological. Cutting training by 40 to 50 percent feels like undermining months of work. The body, freshening up, sometimes feels worse before it feels better — the first three or four days of a taper can produce a heaviness or a flatness that some players misread as “losing fitness.”

I tell players explicitly: the heaviness in the first three to five days of taper is normal. It is the body completing its absorption of the previous block. Push through it. By the end of the first week the legs feel fresh again. By the end of the second week the legs feel light. If you trust the protocol, the protocol works. If you start adding volume back because you panic about the heaviness, you will arrive at the tournament still fatigued and play badly.

The other mental work during the taper is rehearsal. Adults who have spent six to eight weeks in Specific Preparation have practiced execution. The taper is where they can shift to scenario rehearsal — visualizing the first game, the first changeover, the experience of being down a break in the first set. Mental work is high-leverage during the taper because the physical capacity to do more is reduced; the brain is fresh.

When the two-week taper does not fit

Adults often have schedule constraints that make a textbook two-week taper impossible. Work travel, family demands, an injury that flared up at the wrong time. The most useful adjustment principle is: a partial taper, executed well, is better than a no-taper. Even a one-week, 40 percent volume reduction will produce some performance benefit. The worst version is “I will skip the taper because life is too busy, and just play tired” — that almost always produces underperformance plus elevated injury risk.

The other useful exception is the player who has been undertraining and is approaching the tournament under-loaded. Tapering an undertrained athlete reduces performance. The correct intervention there is a final 7-to-10-day intensification block followed by a 4-to-5-day mini-taper. Diagnose accurately. The wrong taper for the situation is worse than no taper.

Multi-week tournaments and recovery between rounds

If the tournament runs over multiple days, the in-tournament management is its own discipline. The principle: maintain readiness, do not chase fitness. Sessions between matches are short, light, focused on movement quality and serve rhythm. Sleep, nutrition, and hydration become the dominant performance levers, not training. A player trying to “stay sharp” by training hard between rounds is almost certainly costing themselves the next match.

For a regional adult event spread across a Friday-to-Sunday weekend, the protocol is: Thursday, a short tune-up. Friday, the first match. Friday evening, 20 minutes of light movement and serve work after recovery time. Saturday, repeat. Sunday, the final or semifinal. Between matches on Sunday, almost nothing — a short walk, maybe a mobility session, the rest is recovery, nutrition, and rest.

One thing to do on court tomorrow

If you have a tournament coming up within the next month, sit down today and write the taper plan on paper. Two weeks out, cut volume by 25 to 30 percent. One week out, cut another 30 to 40. The day before, a 45-minute session and stop. Write the dates. Then, when the panic comes in week two and the heaviness sets in and your training brain tells you to add a long run, look at the paper. The paper is right. The panic is the taper working.

Related in this series: Periodizing an Adult Competitive Year · Block Periodization for Tennis · Microcycle Design · Match-Day Energy Management

Selected reading:

• Mujika, I., & Padilla, S. (2003). Scientific bases for precompetition tapering strategies. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 35(7), 1182–1187.
• Bosquet, L., et al. (2007). Effects of tapering on performance: A meta-analysis. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 39(8), 1358–1365.
• Banister, E. W., et al. (1975). A systems model of training for athletic performance. Australian Journal of Sports Medicine, 7(3), 57–61.
• Pyne, D. B., et al. (2009). Peaking for optimal performance: Research limitations and future directions. Journal of Sports Sciences, 27(3), 195–202.

Written by Emre Köse Tennis Coach · Beykoz Tennis Club

Tennis coach at Istanbul Beykoz Tennis Club for over 12 years. Graduate of the Coaching Education programme at Marmara University Faculty of Sport Sciences.

• 12+ Years on Court
• Graduate of Marmara University Faculty of Sport Sciences

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