Mastering Load Symposium 2016 Recap
I have put together a brief blog post that may be of interest to some patients & coaches at the clinic after attending the Mastering Load Symposium over the previous weekend in Brighton in Melbourne.
It was an interesting weekend put on by Physiosports and had a quality lineup of speakers working in various high-performance programs across the country. I have been trying to match up dates to get to this course for the last couple of years now, so it was great to attend finally.
I have put together a short list below of some of the main things I have taken from the course and that I think my patient base will also get something out of or find interesting.
Athletic success is more likely to be achieved if the athlete has a decreased amount of missed training and competition time due to injury or illness.
Sure this is a brainer really and makes perfect sense, but having this at the forefront of an athlete/coaches mind when planning out the training and competition program can allow the athlete/coach to closely monitor the planned vs actual training loads with an injury prevention hat on at the same time.
Acute Vs Chronic Load Ratio
This was one of the key concepts that was drilled into the attendees throughout the weekend, and as a concept has a lot to offer when working with athletes.
The chronic training load is usually measured by using the last four weeks of training data. Depending on the sport, different metrics may be chosen for the analysis (total km’s run or the number of serve’s in tennis, etc., whichever you think is the most relevant for the individual you are working with). It will change from week to week and is a rolling average of the previous four weeks of training (some sports will monitor additional times for chronic training load – e.g. 10-week average)
The acute training load is usually measured using the last week of training data and looks at the same metric/s used to gauge the chronic training load.
Depending on whether the acute ratio is in excess of the chronic training load average will determine whether the athlete is in a state of fatigue or a state of taper. Monitoring the ratio in the training program allows the athlete/coach to self manage injury risk as a high acute to chronic ratio has been shown to increase non-contact soft tissue injury risk in different sports. The ratio’s that will put the athlete at risk is not exact and will vary from sport to sport and athlete to athlete.
The technology that athletes utilise online with various software such as Training Peaks, Strava etc., will make it relatively easy for the athlete/coach to assess the Acute to Chronic training load ratio.
High chronic training loads offer injury protection for the athlete.
By building up to and maintaining high chronic training loads, the athlete will develop a level of protection from non-contact, soft-tissue based injuries. There appears to be an upper and lower ceiling for training load, and the athlete should try to remain within here. By building up to and maintaining a high chronic training load, the athlete is also better able to handle acute spikes in training load as the gap or amount of increase will not be as significant in relation to the chronic load.
I think this point becomes very relevant for the weekend warrior type trainer or the athlete that consistently misses planned training sessions and, as a result, lowers their chronic training load and continues with their training plan unchanged, effectively putting their body under higher acute training loads in relation to the built-up chronic training load, therefore, putting themselves at higher injury risk.
Establishing a workload history for athletes.
A couple of useful tools were presented to allow the therapist/coach to attain a rough overview of the athletes training loads. These tools will be helpful to put into play at the clinic at SportsMyo when there are issues with training load suspected that are placing the athlete in an injured state.
The more significant use for this for me, though, will be when I am away with athletes/teams on tour to gauge the athlete’s current workload in relation to their normal loads and gain more insights into the potential injury risks of each athlete. From a time point of view, I can see this working out much easier to employ while away with athletes rather than at the clinic, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
On top of the above key points, I picked up a couple of new things regarding athlete screening at the clinic and while on tour, but this was all fairly similar to how I have done things in the past. Still, it is good to see some high-performance staff from other sports put their spin on different things and see what they each place importance on.
These were the main key concepts discussed throughout the weekend that I think will allow me to offer more to my patients in the future and the coaching staff they are working with.
Overall, a full weekend of information and networking with other staff working with athletes to keep them injury-free and helping them to achieve their goals.
