What is ACWR anyway?
ACWR stands for Acute to Chronic Workload Ratio. It’s a term for
understanding your current activity level and how increasing your
training amount or exercise activity may impact your performance or
injury risk.
It is a metric that can be easily used by tennis players and coaches as
well as healthcare professionals working with tennis athletes during
return to play following an injury.
One way to look at it is this:
Low activity levels can lead to poor physical health and placing an athlete at increased risk for injury
High levels of activity or overtraining can increase your injury risk or lead to poor performance
The sweet spot is having a solid baseline level of fitness with training amounts that will improve performance while also minimizing injury risk from overtraining.
Tim Gabbett’s research in load monitoring and load management has suggested that athletes should be training “smarter AND harder” and that it may not be the total amount of training that leads to injury, but large changes week to week that increase injury risk.
To determine your ACWR, log a journal of how many minutes of exercise you do each week. This can include tennis training as well as off court training and conditioning.
To get the most accurate calculation of your “chronic workload” or in other words “your baseline” you should monitor and record this number each week for 4 weeks.
To calculate your “acute workload” or the amount of work you plan to do in the coming week, write down any planned exercise or training you have.
To determine your ACWR and find your sweet spot divide your acute
workload by your chronic workload.
ACWR = acute (minutes)/chronic (minutes)
The sweet spot for minimizing injury risk is considered to be between 0.8-
1.3.
Per research in athletes, anything greater than 1.5 is considered the “danger zone” and associated with an increased risk for injury. Therefore, a big spike in activity level from a relatively lower level activity may cause fatigue, poor performance, or injury while a higher chronic level of activity will be able to withstand a higher acute level of activity and reduce injury risk.
This research was corroborated by Dr. Natalie Myers and colleagues in a group of elite level junior tennis players training at an academy in Austin, TX. Players who increased their acute loads by more than 50% (or an ACWR of 1.5 or more) of their chronic workloads were at a greater risk for sustaining an injury.
6 Tips for Load Management & Injury Prevention (Pluim and Drew, 2016)
Many times, injuries occur when returning from the off-season if players
have not been training as much or performing adequate amounts of cross
training. Some players may not gradually increase their load as they return
to training, which contributes to poor load management and may increase
injury risk.
HERE ARE 6 TIPS TO FOLLOW:
References:
Gabbett TJ. The training-injury prevention paradox: should athletes be training smarter and harder? Br J Sports Med. 2016;50(5):1-9.
Myers NL, Aguilar KV, Mexicano G, Farnsworth JL, Knudson D, Kibler WB. The Acute: Chronic Workload Ratio is Associated with Injust in Junior Tennis Players.
[Published online ahead of print November 25, 2019}. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2019. doi: 10.1249/MSS.0000000000002215.
Pluim BM, Drew MK. It’s not the destination, it’s the ‘road to load’ that matters: a tennis injury prevention perspective. Br J Sports Med. 2016;50(11):641-2.
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