Load Management: What It Is and What It Is Not!

For sport spectators who regularly see their favorite player sitting on the bench, it would be easy to conclude that “load management” predominantly involves greater rest for players, reduced game time, and an opportunity to remove players from training and/or competition. However, while adequate recovery is important to ensure optimal adaptations to a given training stimulus, “recovery” is only one of many training principles that sports medicine and performance staff use to develop physical qualities, minimize injury risk, and ultimately enhance performance. These well-established training principles also include progressive overload, specificity, individuality, variation, and reversibility.

Graded exposure to stress (ie, load) is a fundamental component of evidence-based training programs. In order to improve capacity, the training load applied must exceed the athlete’s current capacity, but not be so great that it results in tissue damage. ⁸ Progressive overload involves the systematic application of training stress and is the cornerstone of rehabilitation, return-to-sport, and performance training programs. ³ Closely aligned with progressive overload is the principle of specificity, as early as the 1940s, researchers demonstrated that the biochemical response of a tissue depended on the type of training that was performed.^7,9 These early studies played a significant role in shaping our understanding of the “needs analysis” for athletes. ¹

While it is acknowledged that athletes need to be exposed to high training loads to tolerate the high-intensity demands of competition, ² these high training loads need to be interspersed with low-intensity training sessions. This polarized approach to training describes the variation principle and has been used as an effective means of enhancing performance in both sprinters and endurance athletes.^5,6 The principle of individuality states that athletes will respond differently to a given training stimulus. This explains, at least in part, why some athletes can tolerate large training loads (eg, think playing minutes) and others cannot. Although load progressions are important to improve capacity, on occasions the training loads of athletes may need to be sensibly regressed (or greater recovery time provided) to minimize negative training adaptations such as excessive fatigue, pain, reductions in performance, and increased reinjury risk. The challenge facing all sports medicine and performance practitioners is ensuring that these reductions in training load do not occur for extended periods of time, otherwise local tissue capacity and sport-specific capacity may be reduced. ⁴ These reductions in capacity that occur during prolonged decreases in training load are referred to as the reversibility principle. Essentially, this principle states that “if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.”

In recognition of the importance of “load management” to professional athletes, military personnel, artistic performers (eg, circus and dancers), adolescent and master athletes, and the general population, and to clarify what it is, and what it is not, Sports Health is devoting a special issue to the topic. Papers that have a clear applied outcome and encompass one or more of the training principles under the “load management” umbrella will be considered for peer review. We invite researchers and practitioners to submit their papers by December 1, 2023. Please email christine@aossm.org to be included in this issue and share the title of the paper you plan to submit. We look forward to your contribution to this leading-edge special issue.

—Tim Gabbett,*†‡§ PhD
Associate Editor, Sport Science