The Basics of Load Management

As coaches and health professionals we put in place a bunch of different strategies to reduce injury risk. While we can never truely “prevent” injuries, and you can’t measure the amount of injuries that didn’t happen in a season, that doesn’t mean there aren’t certain protocols that can be put in place to protect athletes.

One of these is load management. Essentially this is the idea of looking at how much load you have over a given training period and comparing it to that load completed previously. The training period can apply to anything from one training session to a week or two worth of load (from games and training).

Before we get into this I think it’s important to define load. This is easy in this general discussion though because it really depends on the variables in your training. If you have a strength sport athlete where a large percentage of their load comes from lifting weights, you can probably measure load pretty accurately using just tonnage or total weight lifted. Or if you have a runner who spends most of their training running (makes sense right), then total kilometres or kilometres of High Speed Running may be useful. While these don’t take into account RPE or intent, they can still give a pretty good image.

But then what if you have an athlete who does a good amount of both? After all this is a decent percentage of the training population. Well in this case you will probably take into account both or even use RPE as a way to measure load. You don’t need hard numbers for any of these, just an idea of what is actually going on.

Over all, what load management is asking for is common sense. So whatever is placing a demand on your athlete, should be considered their load.

Now, how can we look at load management for our training?

Have a look at the diagram below to explain:

So generally what we want to do when managing load is trying to keep our highs from going too high and our low’s from going too low. This is because we know that injuries often come during or after one of these spikes or troughs in load. We want to keep our loads within the upper and lower thresholds. These thresholds are generally arbitrary, they don’t have values assigned to them. But they will be where you feel effects of over or under training.

The goal of training over time then, is to raise the upper threshold so that you can tolerate more load and become more robust and then this lower threshold will be pulled up with it. The good thing is however that this lower threshold will increase at a slower rate, because as you get stronger, it will be harder to lose that strength.

We use these thresholds to prescribe training load and take this within the context of an entire week.

This is very easy to understand if you are in a sport with one main variable. If you have a long distance runner, rather than having their total running kilometres be sporadic each week with a large amount of variation, you should try and keep some consistency and also try to ramp either increases or decreases in load.

However when you have field and court team athletes, it can become more complex. The main thing to consider here is just common sense. For example many of these athletes during the off season will start to do more resistance training as their running load won’t be as high. So “tonnage” would be high and “kilometres ran” would be relatively low (I’m using these as their variables for simplicity).

Then as they go into their preseason and actual competition, they will ramp the resistance training load down and ramp their running load up until they can meet the demands of their competition.

Once they are in these phases we should keep this consistent. If one of these athletes had a bye one week, instead of just adding a whole bunch of resistance training load, you might instead add a bit of training in the gym and then add a running session that reflects the demands of their competition. This way when they return the following week they are likely to be more ready for their competition.

Because of their similarities, it is worth noting that Acute to Chronic Workload Ratio (A:C WR) doesn’t really have much evidence at all to support it. Really it’s quite the opposite of support. But while this load management concept is very representative of that, the point of this is that we need to apply common sense to training. While there isn’t much support for A:C WR, we do know that when people haven’t been active for a while, and they all of a sudden become very active, this can lead to their body not feeling great. And when athletes who are used to a certain load, have a sudden spike due to whatever factor, this is the area where injuries are more likely to occur if they continue to push.

And it really can be a number of different factors. Whether it is a spike in load because they have actually increased tonnage or kilometres, or it could be things as simple as the surface they are working on, their amount of sleep and recovery or something out of your control like the weather or what they do at work.

And this is where having this concept in the back of your mind is really helpful. Because if you are aware of the load athletes are taking over the week, then when factors change or are adjusted, you can adapt while still keeping your athletes feeling good. And at the end of the day that is important.

So a lot of this just comes down to common sense, right?

So then why do we need to illustrate and name this idea? Just periodise your training.

Well I think that having an understanding this allows you to better periodise a whole training plan. It also makes you more likely to consider more factors than the training load you prescribe, triggering more questions to gather context.

And I think that context is rarely a bad thing.