Abstract:
Different mechanisms to bring out athletes' best performances on time at the major competition are often used. There are two general thoughts about peaking athlete's performance to major competitions. Functional overreaching through continuous but progressive overloading and tapering are the two common ways used in order to achieve a greater training impact on athletes' performance. In contemporary trainings tapering is seen as the best method to increase performance. And examining the effect of tapering on selected physical fitness performance of middle distance athletes was the main purpose for this study. This study used pretest-posttest type quasi experimental design. In this study 16 competitive middle distance athletes from Abo Shamane athletics club with age, height and weight of 23.38years, 1.647cm and 54.62kg respectively who were participating in regular training and national level competitions at Abo shamane athletics club and purposively grouped into taper and control groups. Data were collected using checklists and direct field tests using time trials. In the experiment of two weeks duration intensity of exercises were kept unchanged for each group. The control group were made to continue practicing similar to the previous week, and for the taper group 20% volume increment in the first week and 60% and 20% reduction of volume and frequency respectively in the second week with intensity being constant for the duration of tapering period were used as measurement modality.. Pre- and post- taper trials' standardized mean differences in running times were calculated using IBM SPSS statistics version 26 to discuss the overall effect of tapering on performance. The experimental hypotheses in this study were supported by the performance improvements in the tapering groups which were indicated by significant level of differences with (p< 0.05). In the tapering groups of 1500 meter the performance of wall sit test (M = 73.38) Vs (M = 77.13); t(4) = - 3.147, p = 0.016, Sergeant jump test(M = 63.63 Vs (M = 66.25); t(3) = -2.384, p = 0.049, the performance of 30m acceleration test(M=2.8263) vs (M=2.7300);t(2)=2.812,p=0.26 and the performance of cooper vo2 max test is (M = 43.85650) Vs (M = 45.72338); t(8) = --3.630 , p = 0.08 were obtained as a pre- and post taper result comparisons respectively. Although performance of overall athletes in both groups seem improved in mean times, the statistical difference in the improvements between taper and control groups highlights the positive effect of tapering on athletes running performance. Since tapering shown substantial performance increment, athletes specially the young ones are better to taper so that they can be able to recover from physiological and psychological stresses by using it and achieve better level of performance as an outcome of it.
