Do we really understand
the concept of load management?
“Maybe we could do load management“
I’ve heard someone say this phrase and it stuck with me ever since. It was said in the context of things to apply for injury prevention, right in the same list as warm-ups, ankle exercises, supplements and whatever else you can think of.
It occurred to me that this is a very interesting way to look at load management (and prevention in general), as something you would just do which holds the same value as all these other things you would do. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what load management means, it cannot possibly be in the same list as warm-ups or exercises. It is not even on the same scale of observation.
So what is load management?
Well, load management is, quite literally, the management of load. It is considering all the different ‘load’ in an athletes life, load from the specific activity, load from a-specific activities, load from daily life, while trying to integrate all of this in a program in a way that these things don’t eat each other up while trying to make progress (preferably at multiple areas at the same time). It is essentially a balancing act of demand and capacity, with the goal of long term adaptation, leading to increased performance.
So yes, you should always do ‘load management’, it is inherently tied into periodization and adaptation, and therefore performance. In that sense, it is also a bit weird to view prevention and load management as something that is isolated from training for performance. To improve performance, you want to maximize long term adaptation. To maximize long term adaptation, you need to do the maximal amount of productive work over a maximally long period of time (rather than optimizing a single session or a single week). If you want to achieve that in an inherently uncertain setting, you will have to plan, track and adjust accordingly.
Load management comes down to:
What is the correct dose of work for this specific athlete at this specific time, when I consider the athlete specific factors, all other stressors in the athletes program and life, the recent and long term history, as well as future planning?
Unfortunately, load management recently is getting a bad rep because it is often understood to be rest. Again, I think this ties into the problem I described before in understanding the actual definition. It is not rest, management goes both ways, it is just as much about deloading as it is about preparing for future demand. If you deload too much, you lose capacity to handle load. As I mentioned before, it is a balancing act inherently tied to adaptation, which sometimes means pushing harder and sometimes pulling back.
If we define injury as demand exceeding capacity, then yes, you should always do load management, aka planning and adjusting. And it cannot be in the same list of things as exercise based interventions, because these interventions also lead to load that needs to be managed.
