Training-Load Monitoring (Acute:Chronic)

Training load is the total dose of training stress over time. It comes in two flavors:

• External load — what you did regardless of cost: tonnage, distance, sets, time (see training-volume-load).
• Internal load — the physiological cost: session RPE × duration, HR-based load (see heart-rate-logging).

A widely used way to contextualize load is the acute:chronic workload ratio (ACWR): roughly this week's load ÷ the rolling ~4-week average load. The idea is that spikes in load relative to what you're adapted to are riskier than high load you've built up to gradually. A common (and debated) "sweet-spot" range is around 0.8–1.3, with ratios well above that flagged as elevated injury/overreaching risk.

Important caveat: the ACWR concept is useful as a guardrail but methodologically contested — it shouldn't be treated as a precise injury predictor. The robust takeaways survive the debate: ramp load gradually, avoid sudden spikes, and read load alongside recovery markers (HRV, RHR, readiness — see readiness-recovery-scores) rather than in isolation.

Use it to:

• Confirm a deload actually dropped load (see deload-weeks).
• Catch a too-fast ramp before it becomes overreaching or injury.
• Feed the adjust-the-program decision.

• Load = external (volume/distance/time) + internal (sRPE×duration, HR load).
• sRPE load = session RPE (0–10) × duration (min) — see cardio-rpe.
• ACWR ≈ this week's load ÷ rolling ~4-week average load.
• Often-cited sweet spot ~0.8–1.3; the model is debated, not a precise predictor.
• Core takeaway: ramp gradually, avoid spikes, read with recovery markers.

• cardio-rpe — sRPE load is the simplest internal-load input.
• training-volume-load — the external-load input for strength.
• readiness-recovery-scores — pair load with recovery to interpret it.
• overtraining-overreaching — load spikes precede overreaching.
• deload-weeks — load monitoring confirms deloads land.