The season is over. Now what?

Your season is finished. For most of you it finished a few weeks ago, and the next race that actually matters is a long way off.

Which means that right now, this week, you are making a decision about the next month of your training. For most people it gets made by default rather than on purpose, which is where the cost comes from.

There are two ways this usually goes.

The first is the total shutdown, where the athlete finishes their last race and stops completely. Usually there is a good reason for it. They are fried, or carrying something that needs to settle, or the season ended badly enough that they want distance from it.

The trouble is that nothing marks the end of a break like that, so two weeks becomes six, and six becomes however long it takes for the next season to force the issue.

The second is the opposite, and it is the one that tempts the people who care most. Four days off, then straight back into it. Sprints in week one, because they want to know what they have still got. Heavy squats in week two, because pre-season starts now and they are not going to be the one who fell behind.

I think both are mistakes, and I think they are the same mistake. Both treat the weeks after a season as empty space. One fills it with nothing and one fills it with training, but neither treats it as a phase with its own job to do.

It is one, though, and it has a name.

In Tudor Bompa's writing on periodisation, the annual plan has three major phases. Preparatory, which most of us call pre-season. Competitive, which is the season. And transition, which is the off-season, sitting inside the plan as a phase in its own right.

Bompa traces it back to Philostratus describing how the ancient Olympians organised their year in the same three parts under different names, being preparation, the Olympic Games, and relaxation. So this is not a modern soft option that arrived with sports science.

The obvious question, then. If you take a few weeks off, what does it actually cost you?

Mujika and Padilla published a two part review in Sports Medicine in 2000 mapping what happens when a trained athlete stops, and they split it at four weeks, with under four weeks counting as short term detraining and over four weeks as long term.

In the short term, the aerobic side goes first and goes fast. Maximal oxygen uptake and blood volume drop, and stroke volume, the amount of blood the heart moves with each beat, falls and takes maximal cardiac output with it. Glycogen and lactate threshold come down, and the capillary network feeding the muscle gets sparser.

The strength side of the picture is different.

In the same review, training induced changes in fibre cross sectional area, the thickness of the muscle fibres themselves, are reversed, but strength performance declines are limited.

So if you have been reluctant to back off because you do not want to lose your squat, that particular worry is misplaced.

A few weeks of genuinely reduced training does not empty out your strength.

The muscle changes some, the performance largely holds, and what you lose fastest is the conditioning underneath it, which is the cheapest thing in your program to rebuild.

There is a caveat, and it sits on the aerobic side rather than the strength side.

The review notes those cardiorespiratory losses are more moderate in recently trained people than in highly trained ones, which means the better trained you are, the more you stand to lose.

A more recent review, by Barbieri and colleagues in 2023, gets to the practical version. They were looking at endurance athletes rather than sprinters, so I am not going to pretend it transfers cleanly to a 200m runner, but their conclusion is hard to argue with in principle.

Total cessation produces the losses above, while a partial reduction helps mitigate the worst of them, and they name this specifically as a consideration when moving between training seasons.

Reduce, in other words, rather than stopping.

So what does reducing actually look like? Here is what I would give you.

Thirty minutes of easy swimming, half an hour of easy running on grass, a bodyweight circuit of press ups, sit ups, lunges, tricep dips, glute bridges and abs at thirty seconds on and thirty seconds off, forty five minutes on the bike, stretching, and genuine rest days on top of all of it.

The rules I would put round that matter as much as the sessions themselves. Keep volume and intensity both genuinely low. Leave technique alone, because this is not the block for it. Protect your flexibility.

Keep some strength work in, since that is the quality you are least likely to lose and the cheapest to hold onto. And accept that a good part of what you are buying here is a mental break from twenty or thirty weeks of demands.

How long to run it is the one thing I would not copy out of anybody else's plan.

It depends entirely on when you next need to be sharp, which is why a masters athlete with no indoor season and a schoolboy sprinter with a December start should not be getting the same answer.

Two weeks at the short end, and up to six if the next race that matters is a long way out. Irena Szewinska gave it six in her own annual plan, and an Olympic champion writing six weeks of active rest into a five period year was not guessing.

Now the other failure mode, the people who went straight back in.

This is the one I would push back on hardest. General qualities, the posture and joint strength and coordination and mobility stuff, are in short supply in modern athletes because of how everyone now lives.

Introduce highly specialised, event specific stimuli before those foundations have been developed, allowed to stabilise and then built on, and you get what Dan Pfaff describes as a source of tremendous frustration and recurring injury patterns.

Recurring is the word that should worry you there, because that kind of pattern follows an athlete all year.

The upside runs the same way.

As athletes acquire efficient posture in simple motor tasks, advanced skills come faster and the long term injury patterns lessen or disappear. That work is sprint drills, multiple jumps and throws, mobility circuits and medicine ball work.

Which is why I would keep the first few weeks back almost entirely general, whatever an athlete tells me about how good they feel. The one who comes back sharp and wants to prove it in week one is the one I would watch closest.

The frame I use for all of this I took from Boo Schexnayder, and it is the most useful single idea I have for managing a training year. I put everything into one of two buckets.

Neuromuscular work, meaning acceleration, speed development, speed endurance, Olympic lifts, jumps, throws and heavy lifting. General work, meaning general strength, medicine ball, dynamic flexibility, circuits, hurdle mobility and tempo.

Through most of the year I want those two sitting somewhere between a 40/60 and a 60/40 balance, which is roughly where Schexnayder reckons good speed and power programs live. The ratio is the thing I actually reach for when an athlete is flat, or flying, or coming back off a break.

So that is your lever for the next few weeks. Push it as far towards general as it will go, then spend pre-season walking it back the other way, a bit at a time, until you are race ready.

One more thing, and it is easy to skip. Do the audit now, while the season is still fresh.

Go back through the training log and compare what actually got done against what was written down. Count the sessions the niggle cost you, and note where in the year it kept turning up.

Then look at where the time went in your races, not just the time on the clock at the end. Losing ground over the first thirty metres and dying over the last twenty are different problems, and they need different work in the winter.

Whatever that turns up is what the next block gets built around, and you have a few weeks in hand to decide it properly.