Do you play or do you train? Insights from individual sports for training load and injury risk management in team sports based on individualization

The understanding of the potential causes of musculoskeletal injuries in any competitive sport needs to address their multifactorial nature, which results from complex associations among different external conditions and modifiable and non-modifiable intrinsic risk factors (Drew and Purdam, 2016; Kalkhoven et al., 2020a). In this context, the cause of any non-contact injury merely results from a sum of loads generating a force that exceeds the limit supported by the respective biological tissue (Zernicke and Whiting, 2008). Consequently, it has been suggested that a poor load management is a major risk factor for injury in sport settings (Gabbett, 2016). One novel monitoring tool for injury risk management is the acute: chronic workload ratio (ACWR). The ACWR is currently in the spot light of sport sciences (Griffin et al., 2020; Maupin et al., 2020). While some emerging evidence suggests that it is a valid method to identify an increased injury risk (Andrade et al., 2020), other authors have pointed out its methodological limitations and even questioned its validity (Impellizzeri et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020). Proponents of the ACWR approach argue that athletes are at greater risk of sustaining a time-loss injury when the ACWR is higher relative to a lower or moderate ACWR (Andrade et al., 2020). In other words, the ACWR helps to identify critical windows in terms of elevated injury risk based on imbalanced training loading as for example sudden spike loads (Bowen et al., 2020). The ACWR supposedly follows the classical fitness-fatigue model (Banister et al., 1975). Paradoxically, the rationale for the ACWR resides on several assumptions that are not in agreement with expected coaching practices as, for instance, progressive loading (Foster et al., 1995). Further, the occurrence of a sudden spike, in the context of any sport, could be simply interpreted as a training load error (Drew and Purdam, 2016; Kalkhoven et al., 2020b). In this respect, it is important to note that the ACWR literature includes mostly team sport studies, with the exception of a few studies in individual sports (Collette et al., 2018; Myers et al., 2020). For instance, a single study in swimming found the Acute Recovery and Stress Scale (ARSS) to be more valid than the ACWR to monitor recovery-stress (Collette et al., 2018). In another recent study in junior tennis it was suggested that ACWR and injury history were the best predictors of injury incidence (Myers et al., 2020). It should be noted that tennis is an individual sport with the players directly interacting with each other, therefore it shares some mutual characteristics with most team sports. These mutual characteristics may include a number of contextual factors such as score line, match location, opposition standard, moment of the season, playing formation, player's role (Paul et al., 2015; Rago et al., 2019a; Curtis et al., 2020), and playing surface (Rago et al., 2019b; Vescovi and Falenchuk, 2019). For this reason, in this article we will refer to individual sports as those sports in which single athletes do not experience direct opposition from their opponents during competitions, with performances being strongly linked to physiological capacity (e.g., track and field or swimming). In this context, the limited number of ACWR studies in individual sports may be therefore not casual thus suggesting an inappropriate load management in some team sports under certain circumstances, probably related to the complexity associated to the existence of contextual factors which, in turn, would influence the physical and physiological profiles of team sport athletes. Therefore, the aim of this opinion article is to provide a rationale based on coaching practices and scientific evidence from individual and team sports, that may help to better understand and, subsequently improve, training loads and injury risk management in team sports.
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Aiheet: vamma ennaltaehkäisy harjoittelupäiväkirja yksilöllinen urheilupeli ennaltaehkäisy harjoittelun suunnittelu kuormitusjärjestys valmennus urheilija harjoittelu harjoittelun jaksotus urheilufysiologia
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DOI: 10.3389/fphys.2020.00995
Julkaisussa: Frontiers in Physiology
Julkaistu: 2020
Vuosikerta: 11
Numero: 995
Sivuja: 1-6
Julkaisutyypit: artikkeli
Kieli: englanti (kieli)
Taso: kehittynyt