Recovery Week
A deliberately lighter week built into a plan every few weeks, scheduled proactively so accumulated fatigue clears before it turns into a bigger problem.
A recovery week is a planned reduction in training volume, usually every few weeks, built into a periodized plan from the start rather than added in reaction to how an athlete happens to feel that week. Intensity often stays partly in place. Overall load, the total volume the body has to absorb and recover from, comes down.
Why it's scheduled, not reactive
Fatigue from training doesn't clear on its own if load keeps climbing week after week. Chronic Training Load (fitness) rises slowly and steadily with consistent work, but Acute Training Load (recent fatigue) can climb faster than it's given room to dissipate. Left unmanaged, that gap widens until a light week gets forced on the athlete anyway, usually by illness, injury, or the flat, unresponsive training that's an early sign of overreaching. A recovery week built into the plan in advance is the same reduction, timed on purpose instead of extracted by a body that's run out of margin.
That's the core distinction from just "taking it easy when you're tired." Reacting to fatigue after it's already accumulated is playing catch-up. A scheduled recovery week clears the debt before it gets large enough to force a much longer break later.
How often, and how much
There's no single number that applies to every athlete or plan, and a rule that hardcodes one tends to be wrong for someone. As a general pattern in periodized training, a lighter week shows up roughly every three to four weeks of building load, with volume typically dropping somewhere in the range of 10 to 40% below the weeks around it, depending on the coach and the athlete's fitness. Where a specific plan lands in that range depends on the athlete's training history, the phase of the plan, and how the preceding weeks actually went, which is exactly the kind of decision that belongs in a coaching rules engine rather than a fixed template applied identically to everyone.
Not the same thing as a taper
A recovery week and a taper both reduce training volume, which is why they get confused. They serve different jobs. A recovery week happens repeatedly throughout a training block, months before any goal race, to let fatigue clear so the next build phase starts from a rested state. A taper happens once, in the final days or weeks before a specific event, to shed the fatigue from months of accumulated training while fitness itself holds. Treating every light week as a mini-taper, or treating a taper as just another recovery week, misses what each one is actually for.
What it looks like in practice
A well-built recovery week isn't a week off. Sessions get shorter or less frequent, and the hardest efforts usually come down or drop out entirely, but some structure typically stays in place rather than the week collapsing into unplanned rest. The goal isn't losing fitness for a week; it's letting the previous weeks of real training actually turn into fitness, something that happens during recovery rather than during the training session itself.