Load management
Load management is about keeping each athlete in the sweet spot — training hard enough to adapt, not so hard (or so suddenly) that they break down. It has two views: a squad-wide heatmap and a per-athlete drill-down.
Who can use it: admins and coaches (the deep views span the whole squad, which players aren't permitted to see).
The idea: acute vs chronic
The core metric is ACWR — the acute:chronic workload ratio. It compares what an athlete has done recently (their acute load) against what they're conditioned for (their chronic base). Both are exponentially weighted moving averages (EWMA) — recent days count for more and older days fade out smoothly, rather than a hard 7-day / 28-day cut-off. On the intermittent (~twice-a-week) schedule most GAA clubs run, EWMA de-noises the false spikes a rolling average threw up on light weeks.
Because high-speed running is burstier than overall running, the bands are stream-aware — HSR is allowed to run a little hotter before it flags:
| Band | Distance / mechanical | High-speed running | Reads as |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under base | below 0.8 | below 0.8 | undertrained relative to their base |
| On base | 0.8–1.15 | 0.8–1.25 | a healthy match — the sweet spot |
| Caution | 1.15–1.30 | 1.25–1.40 | load rising faster than the base — monitor |
| High | above 1.30 | above 1.40 | a sharp spike — elevated injury risk |
A striped/grey cell means there isn't enough data yet to compute a ratio. These are v1 EWMA bands, coach-validated on real GAA load and due a review after a full block. Full definitions are in the Metrics reference.
Squad Load — the heatmap
A 10-week grid: one row per athlete, one column per week, sorted with the most-loaded athletes at the top. Two modes:
- ACWR — each cell shows the ratio, coloured by band. Read a row left to right to see how an athlete arrived at where they are today.
- Weekly load — each athlete expands into distance, high-speed and sprint sub-rows, shaded by volume so you can compare weeks within a row.
The latest week is ringed to anchor your eye, and match weeks carry a small corner marker — amber for your club, purple for a dual-code athlete's other club.
Player Analysis — the drill-down
Pick an athlete (dropdown or prev/next arrows) and you get their load balance strip:
- A freshness chip giving their current band at a glance.
- Recent (7d) plotted against base (28d), with daily bars for the last fortnight.
- Match markers counting down to the next fixture (MD-3, MD-2 … MD-0), so you can see whether load is building or tapering into the game.
- A note if some of the load comes from another club (consented dual-code players).
This is the same strip embedded on the athlete page — use it to plan the week around the fixture.