Blue Bombers Playoff Push: What Pro Athletes Do in a Playoff Week You Can Borrow

Late October in Winnipeg means two things at once: the first real cold is on its way, and the CFL regular season is winding down. If the Blue Bombers are in the hunt again, the city's attention turns to the playoff weeks in November, when the stakes are highest and the bodies are most beaten up.

What's interesting from a rehab perspective is what professional teams do during those weeks. The instinct of most recreational athletes heading into something important, a tournament, a race, a tryout, is to train harder. Pro teams do roughly the opposite. There's a lot in that worth borrowing.

They train less, not more

By the time a football team reaches the playoffs, the physical work has been done. Twenty-odd weeks of practice and games have built whatever fitness is going to be built. The job in a playoff week is to arrive on game day fresh, not to add capacity.

This is a principle sports science has studied extensively under the name tapering. Reducing training volume in the days before competition, while keeping some intensity so the body stays sharp, reliably improves performance compared with training straight through.¹ The fatigue drops faster than the fitness does, and the gap between them is where performance lives.

For a recreational athlete, the lesson is that the week before a race or tournament is the wrong time to make up for missed training. Cut volume, keep a little intensity, and trust the work you've done. We've written about deload weeks in more detail, and the same logic applies.

They protect sleep aggressively

Sleep is probably the single most effective recovery tool available, and professional teams treat it that way. Travel schedules get built around it. Practice times shift to allow it. Players are coached on it.

The evidence is clear enough to justify the attention. Sleep loss impairs reaction time, decision-making, and sustained effort, and it blunts the body's ability to repair tissue between sessions.² Extending sleep in the days before competition has the opposite effect. It doesn't require anything expensive. It requires deciding that an extra hour in bed matters more than the extra hour of whatever you'd otherwise be doing.

For someone with a nagging injury, this matters even more. Poor sleep lowers pain thresholds and slows recovery, which we've discussed in our post on sleep and pain. If you're nursing something into a competition, the nights before it are not the time to cut corners.

They manage the week, not just the day

A pro team's week is planned backward from kickoff. The hardest practice happens early in the week, when there's time to recover from it. Later sessions get shorter and more specific. The day before is light: walkthroughs, mental preparation, not much else.

The underlying idea is that load has to be managed across time, not just in a single session. The injury research in team sports has shown that it's less the total amount of training that gets athletes hurt than sudden spikes relative to what they've been doing.³ There are no bad exercises, only too much too soon. A hard, unfamiliar session two days before a competition is a spike at the worst possible moment.

Weekend athletes often do this without noticing. A Thursday night practice turns into a scrimmage, Saturday is a two-game tournament day, and Sunday brings a sore hamstring that didn't need to happen. Spreading the demand across the week, with the heaviest work furthest from the event, is a planning habit anyone can adopt.

They recover on purpose, and keep it simple

Professional recovery setups can look elaborate: cold tubs, compression boots, massage tables, nutrition staff. It's easy to assume that's where the magic is. The consensus among researchers is more grounded. The foundation of recovery is adequate sleep, enough food and fluid, and sensible load management; the rest is supplementary, and much of it works through how it makes the athlete feel as much as through any measurable physiological effect.⁴

That's not a criticism. Feeling recovered matters. But if you're a recreational athlete deciding where to put your attention before a competition, the order is clear. Sleep first. Eat and hydrate properly. Plan the week's load. Then, if you enjoy a massage or a contrast shower and it helps you relax, add it. Just don't let the add-ons stand in for the basics.

It's also worth noticing what pro athletes do about injuries in a playoff week. They don't ignore them. A player who's hurt gets assessed, gets a plan that balances playing against the risk of making it worse, and usually keeps training around the injury rather than stopping everything. That balance, between protecting an injury and staying active, is a large part of how we approach sport injuries at any level, and it's rarely an all-or-nothing choice.

Borrow the mindset, not the budget

None of what a CFL team does in November requires a professional budget to imitate. Train less and sharper in the final week. Sleep more than you think you need. Put the hard work early and the light work late. Keep recovery simple and consistent. Take an injury seriously without letting it stop everything.

Whether your event is a curling bonspiel, a late-season road race, a hockey tournament, or just wanting to feel good watching the game, the same principles hold. The pros aren't doing anything mysterious. They're doing the basics with more discipline than most of us manage, and that's the part worth copying.

References

1. Mujika I, Padilla S. Scientific bases for precompetition tapering strategies. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2003;35(7):1182-1187.
2. Fullagar HH, Skorski S, Duffield R, Hammes D, Coutts AJ, Meyer T. Sleep and athletic performance: the effects of sleep loss on exercise performance, and physiological and cognitive responses to exercise. Sports Med. 2015;45(2):161-186.
3. Gabbett TJ. The training-injury prevention paradox: should athletes be training smarter and harder? Br J Sports Med. 2016;50(5):273-280.
4. Kellmann M, Bertollo M, Bosquet L, et al. Recovery and performance in sport: consensus statement. Int J Sports Physiol Perform. 2018;13(2):240-245.