Acute:Chronic Workload Ratio

[joclubbsportsci]

The Acute:Chronic Workload Ratio is getting a lot of attention recently thanks to papers such as these:
*The acute:chronic workload ratio predicts injury: high chronic workload may decrease injury risk in elite rugby league players
*The training-injury prevention paradox: should athletes be training smarter and harder?
*Has the athlete trained enough to return to play safely? The acute:chronic workload ratio permits clinicians to quantify a player's risk of subsequent injury

It is something I spend a lot of time discussing with others and has already ignited some discussion in our Starting Loads in Rehabilitation thread in the Injury & RTP topic. So I thought it would be good to start a thread discussing it in terms of the training environment to discuss the strengths/weaknesses, questions and case studies people might have.

In the injury topic, davemckay16 previously wrote:

This is a little off the topic of Loads for Rehab but in relation to acute:chronic load monitoring can someone help me to understand how we include the game loads within this model.
All the examples of Acute:Chronic load monitoring I have seen involve training loads over multiple weeks in a nice linear fashion but how can this be done within a season where one week you have 4 training sessions and 1 game and the next 9 days you have 3 games and 2 recovery sessions and 2 MD -1 sessions. Then the next week 6 training days and 1 game.
This is just a random example but many of us deal with crazy schedules like this.
I am not trying to dismiss Acute:Chronic load monitoring by any means, just trying to get a better insight and understanding, any help or suggestions would be great,
Thanks

I think this very example highlights where the A:C may be of most use, where there is variation in the schedule which is reality for most of us working in professional sporting environments. We certainly need to capture both training and game loads and combine the data to establish the acute and chronic workloads. If you are lucky enough to be able to use the same system for training and games then you can track a whole range of variables. If however you have to use different systems for training and games you may not be able to use many variables interchangeably due to the between system reliability. I still think in this instance a global marker with good between system reliability i.e. Total Distance, may still give some insight into highlighting these differences and potential spikes in loads as you move through your schedule despite being limited for a number of reasons.

There is a lot of potential to discuss with this concept so would love to hear other thoughts, questions and experiences.

[NColl]

I have put together a monitoring spreadsheet using the ac ratio which is setup to use two different ratios as such. One is the basic weekly ratio and the second is a ratio which updates every day using the information based on the previous 28 days. The second one is based on the Gabbatts research however we don't get a ratio until the end of every week. I feel the second option has more potential as a constant monitoring tool yet I'm sure if it will work as well.

At the moment it is using total distance, high speed metres and high metabolic load meters to calculate 3 separate ratios from each metric. Hopefully one or two will prove more sensitive and we can reduce the number used over time.

We also have another part which, once we have sufficient data, allow us to potentially individualise the thresholds to each player or see if the thresholds from Gabbatts research aren't suitable to football and need to be changed.

[SteveBarrett]

Hi All,

It's an interesting topic at the minute and one getting much attention. Myself and Tim are looking at doing a research article on this and the influencing factors within soccer clubs as well. While we have got 2 seasons worth of data from one club it would be great if anyone else is willing to get involved in exchange for co-authorship? Rather then seeing multiple case studies on single clubs getting done it would be great if using forums such as this we could organise collaborative research between clubs. Confidentiality would be maintained throughout with data from participating clubs and given to a none football statistician (one of Tim's students) to analyse the data and feedback the results for the study. If anyone is interested please drop me an e-mail on [email protected] or [email protected]. Ideally using Catapult S5/X4 units. I can discuss more of the variables over e-mail and the procedure.

Once I figure out how to set up a new chat (Jo might have to do it on my behalf!) I'll set up a collaborative research focus group on here to exchange ideas and look at future research questions for research etc between multiple practitioners for those interested?

Good work on the forum guys as well btw!

Steve B