Athlete Load Management for normal people

Workload management is one of my favorite topics in all of my work, as it combines all of my fields into one: sports science, coaching, neuroscience, and psychology. And it should be yours too - because load and its management impact everything.

And when I say this article is for “Normal People”, I mean people who don’t have access to La Liga-level sport scientists and MLS-style technology and equipment to collect data constantly.

Yeah, this one is for us Poors.

So let’s be realistic.

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Load management is the measurement and interpretation of fatigue vs. fitness, the work vs. the recovery to get the adaption (more fitness and better performance) that we desire.

We want to know how much of what kind of training stressor athletes receive (and how much of what kinds they need) in order to get an adaption (and how much/what kind of adaption) - in a general sense, the primary goal is an improved fitness and performance.

Now all of this seems very complicated, but I promise it’s something you’ve thought about before.

We are just talking about fatigue. How and which kind of exercises and how much training fatigues us, and how quickly we can recover to perform at maximum capacity again, and then train again to increase our baseline capacity, so our best performance is better than last time. That is load management.

When tracking and managing loads, we often think of the numbers we know: the sets, reps, weights, and how many sessions a week we train. Exercise selection plays a role as well. That is called external load, and it measures the amount of work the athlete completes in any given session, a day, a training week, a program cycle.

This is obviously critical information for coaches, sport scientists, and even athletes themselves to know. How many minutes did you train this week? How much distance was covered at 100% sprint in this session? What is your 1RM deadlift, so we know how to program your strength training appropriately? How many of the runs during the match were maximal sprints? This is all valuable information for us to understand how much work the athlete has done in any given timeframe, how much work we want them to do, and if (and how) they are improving.

What is less simple to measure, plan for, and estimate, however, is the internal load. This part of the equation is just as vital, though, as it helps us understand fatigue and adaption. Our internal states provide us valuable information about what kind of stimuli are beneficial, how much volume is too much, and what intensity we work best at. We need to know this in order to plan training and competition accordingly; without clearly understanding what impact certain loads have on the brain and body, we giving the wrong type or amount of stimulus and missing out on the adaptions and improvements we were after.

Internal load data also give us knowledge about the nervous system - the queen bee of the brain + body! - and how much we need to recover in order to perform well. Without this data, we run the risk of under- and overtraining, and anyone who has survived a bout of overtraining or injury can attest to how frustrating that can be.

As with external load monitoring, data is key for internal loads.

However, as we can’t really legally/morally/actually have a look inside the body to get these answers, internal load monitoring can easily (and cost-effectively!) be done via self-report questionnaire, sometimes called a Wellness Survey.

An example of a bi-weekly load management survey that can be made easily in Excel or Google Sheets. White Lion Athletes use TrainHeroic App’s wellness questionnaire and metrics, and most training apps have a feature like this.

At White Lion, for athletes for whom I receive no additional data (GPS/HR/HRV/etc), we use a daily or bi-weekly Wellness Survey that is found inside their training app. On a scale of 1-10, athletes rate their agreement with each quality first thing in the morning, before even starting their day or going to train. As motivation for honesty and consistency in self-report questionnaires can be… questionable, I tell my clients how important this information is to how I help them train and how they perform, plus it stays confidential between the two of us. It helps me plan, helps them recover, and is 100% an overwhelming benefit. So far, so good.

Important internal data points to measure: psychological state/mental hygiene, sleep quantity and quality, nutritional quality and meals (or kcal count, if that is relevant to your sport/training), stress level, pain, soreness/discomfort, perception of fatigue, general mood, motivation, perception of training, and anything else that will help you plan and understand the athlete.

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To be honest, this article is incredibly oversimplified, as load management is (for me) an incredible expansive, endlessly fascinating, and vital process to understand and implement.

However, as promised, this is for us normal people - no technology, no bags of cash, no time to spare to learn tons of new skills.

This is just simple math.

External load: calculating how much volume, intensity, and frequency athletes get in a session, a week, a month, a cycle, a year.

Internal load: self-report questionnaires, with primary data points measured on scale of 1-10.

It’s the story of fatigue vs. fitness, of knowing when to push and when to pull back and recover.

If you track player data over time, even though these methods seem astoundingly simple, you will be amazed after weeks, months, and years at the stories these data tell.

Lastly, a word to the wise: don’t collect data that you can’t use. It might be nice to have, but it’s a waste of time for your player and for you. Get what you need, crunch the numbers, collect more if needed, and get out.

So get creative. Plan accordingly. Improve that baseline and take a rest day.