TLDR: My marathon taper as someone who lifts five days a week comes down to two moves. First, the gym goes upper body only so my legs get a break, and I keep the upper body days on the calendar but cut them back a little, mainly so I don’t get hurt. Second, the week before the race I skip the gym completely and have a super lazy week to save up energy. The research backs both halves. You can cut training volume hard without losing fitness, and two weeks off barely touches strength in trained lifters, so one lazy week costs you nothing.
Every marathon taper guide has a section about the gym, and they all say some version of the same thing. Stop.
Stop lifting ten days out. Stop lifting heavy three weeks out and do air squats instead. Or, in plenty of cases, don’t mention the gym at all, because whoever wrote it assumed you’re a runner who does a few planks on Tuesdays.
I’m not that guy. I lift five days a week, and for most of a training block my running fits around the gym rather than the other way around. So here’s what my taper actually looks like in the gym, and why I don’t walk away from the barbell three weeks before race day.
What Every Marathon Taper Guide Gets Wrong About Lifting
The running half of the marathon taper is well covered. Cut your mileage over the last three weeks, keep a little pace work so your legs remember what fast feels like, and show up rested. RunnersConnect has a solid week by week taper breakdown if that’s what you’re after, and I’m not going to pretend I can improve on it.
The science is pretty settled too. A meta-analysis by Bosquet and colleagues found performance improved most when training volume dropped by 41 to 60% over about two weeks, with intensity and frequency left alone. A 2021 study of 158,117 recreational marathoners found that runners who stuck to a strict three week taper finished a median of 5 minutes 32 seconds faster than runners who barely tapered at all.
The gym half is where it falls apart. The advice ranges from stop strength training completely ten days before your race to drop to bodyweight or 30 to 40% of your max for the final two weeks. Polar’s taper guide doesn’t mention strength training once.
None of that is wrong for a runner. It just isn’t written for someone whose gym routine is the thing they’re trying not to lose. And none of the ones I read split upper body from lower body, which turns out to be the whole trick.
Where I’m Starting From
Some context so you can scale this to your own life instead of copying mine. I lift five days a week on my lunch break, push, pull, legs, upper, lower, Monday through Friday. I run at 5 AM on the days my plan says to. I’ve got three daughters and a full time job, so all of it gets squeezed into the margins.
I’ve run one full marathon, the 2025 Pittsburgh Marathon, in 4:26:48. I trained for a second one and never ran it because of an injury. I’m not a coach. I’m a developer who has tested a lot of this on himself, sometimes badly.
My Marathon Taper Is Two Moves
My taper in the gym has exactly two pieces, and neither one is complicated:
- The gym goes upper body only, and the upper body days get cut back a little
- The week before the race, no gym at all
That’s it. That’s the whole method. The interesting part is why each piece is there.
Move One: The Legs Come Out
By the time I’m tapering, the gym is upper body only. My legs get a break.
If you’ve read my six month half marathon plan for people who lift, you know the seven mile rule. Once the long run passes about seven miles, lower body days come out of the week entirely, and something light like swimming, walking or the stair stepper goes in their place. Follow that rule in a marathon buildup and leg day is gone months before the taper starts.
The logic is simple. Once the long run gets long, it stops being cardio and turns into a lower body session with its own recovery bill. Stack a squat day on top of it and you’re paying twice for one set of legs.
The taper makes that math worse, not better. The entire point of the last few weeks is letting your legs absorb four months of work. Every heavy set of squats is one more thing they have to recover from instead.
Upper Body Days Stay, Just Smaller
Here’s where I split from every guide I read. The upper body days don’t go anywhere. Same days, same lunch break, same gym.
I do cut back a little, and mainly for one reason: making sure I don’t get hurt. A tweaked shoulder from chasing a bench number three weeks out isn’t going to make me faster. It’s just a new way to screw up a race I’ve spent months building toward, and an injury that close to race day has no time left to heal.
The research says cutting back costs you almost nothing. The Bosquet meta-analysis found the best tapers cut volume while keeping frequency, which is exactly what keeping the days and trimming the work does. Strength holds up the same way. In a 2011 study by Bickel and colleagues, people who trained three days a week for 16 weeks kept their strength gains through the next 32 weeks on one session a week, even at a ninth of their original volume.
So your bench isn’t going anywhere in a few weeks of doing a bit less. The only thing that can go anywhere is you, if you get hurt pushing it.
Why I Keep Showing Up at All
There’s a second reason the upper body days stay, and it has nothing to do with muscle.
It’s the appointment. I go to the gym at the same times on the same days all year, and that’s the reason I still go. It’s why the old leg day slots get swimming laps or the stair stepper instead of nothing. None of that is training. It’s there so I keep walking through the door at lunch.
Walk away from the gym for the last three weeks of a marathon block and you haven’t lost three weeks of workouts. You’ve lost the habit, and the habit is the expensive thing to rebuild after the race, when you’re sore, bored, and very easily convinced you’ve earned a month off.
Move Two: The Lazy Week
Then the week before the race, I skip the gym entirely. No upper body, no stair stepper, nothing. Just a super lazy week to save up energy.
That sounds like it contradicts everything I just said about protecting the habit. It doesn’t, because it has an end date. Skipping the gym for one planned week with a race at the end of it isn’t a broken habit. It’s a scheduled one.
It doesn’t cost anything either. A 2017 study of trained men found their strength gains held up after two full weeks without lifting at all. One week off won’t cost you a pound on the bar. What it does is take one more thing off your plate during the week your body is trying to top off the tank.
It also lines up with that Strava study. The strict tapers, where training dropped every single week right up to race day, beat the relaxed ones where volume bounced back up in the middle. A lazy week is about as strict as a taper gets. It’s the one week of the year where doing nothing is the plan.
What I Got Wrong Before This
I found the seven mile number the dumb way. I used to keep adding miles and leave the gym schedule completely alone, because it was working and I couldn’t see why it would ever stop. It stops. Somewhere past seven miles I’d either get hurt or end up with lower body fatigue bad enough that I couldn’t do anything else with my day.
Nobody handed me that threshold. I kept running into it until I finally wrote it down.
And I’ve trained for a whole second marathon that I never got to run, because of an injury. That’s the part no taper guide really prepares you for. A training block can go right for months and still not get you to the start line. If you want the rest of what I got wrong the first time around, it’s all in what I wish I knew before my first marathon.
The Results
The 2025 Pittsburgh Marathon, 4:26:48, a 10:03 average pace and 939 feet of climbing on a course that doesn’t let up anywhere.
I can’t tell you the taper is why I ran that time. One marathon isn’t a sample size, and there’s no control group of me who kept squatting through race week. What I can tell you is that it’s simple, it lines up with the research, and my upper body days never fell off the calendar until the one week I planned for.
How to Taper for a Marathon If You Lift
You don’t need my split or my schedule to do this. Stripped down, it’s four decisions:
- When your long runs get long, take the lower body days out and put something light in their place, not more upper body work
- Keep your upper body days on the same days and times through the taper, but do a little less of it and skip the PR attempts
- Take the week before the race off from the gym completely
- Pick your running taper from a real plan and follow it strictly, with mileage going down every week
If you’re earlier in the process and still figuring out how to fit the lifting in at all, start with my current gym routine and build from there.
Try This First
Open your training plan and find race week. Write “no gym” across the whole thing. Then go back three weeks and write “upper only, a little less” on that one.
Do it now, while you’re in the middle of the block and thinking clearly. Three weeks out, with fresh legs and a lot of nervous energy, you’re going to want one last leg day. Don’t give yourself the option.