Load monitoring only tells you what already happened

Training load systems are excellent accountants and poor forecasters, and clubs keep buying them as though they were the second thing.

The pitch from every load monitoring platform is prevention. Track the work, watch the ratios, catch the athlete before the injury. It sells because it promises the one thing every club wants, and because the alternative is admitting that a large share of soft-tissue injuries were not going to be seen coming.

Start with what the systems do well, which is real. They count. Distance, high-speed metres, accelerations, minutes, and they count them consistently across a squad and a season. That is genuinely useful and it was not available twenty years ago. A coach who thinks a player has been managed lightly can be shown that he has covered more high-speed ground than anybody in the building.

The forecasting claim is where it falls apart. Load ratios comparing a recent block against a longer baseline became close to gospel for a while, and then people looked properly at the maths and found that the way the ratio is constructed makes it correlate with itself, that the thresholds moved depending on how you calculated them, and that the same numbers were being used to justify opposite decisions at different clubs.

There is a deeper reason it cannot work as advertised. The measurement is external. It records what the athlete did, and injury risk depends on what that work did to him, which is a function of tissue capacity, history, sleep, age, genetics and the specific awkward landing in minute sixty-three that no summary variable will ever contain. Two players covering identical distances are not under identical strain and never were.

So I would reframe the whole purchase. Buy these systems as a record, not as an alarm. A record lets you answer whether a returning player has been progressed sensibly, whether a fixture pile-up actually landed on the people you thought, whether last week matched the plan. All retrospective. All valuable.

The alarm function encourages a worse habit, which is waiting for a red flag instead of building a programme that assumes load will be uneven and prepares tissue for it anyway.

Progressive exposure works. Watching a dashboard does not. One of those is much easier to sell.