Weekly training load scenario planner
Problem
The coming week's sessions get sketched out on a whiteboard or a shared spreadsheet in the Monday planning meeting: three fixtures in ten days, so cut Tuesday's volume, add a recovery day, extend the captain's rest because he played every minute last week. None of that is checked against what each athlete actually carried the fortnight before. The acute to chronic workload ratio only gets calculated after the week is delivered, when the GPS platform's report lands and shows players spiked well past their usual range. By then the week cannot be undone, and the conversation about who got overloaded happens after the fact instead of before the plan was set.
Product idea
A planning screen where a coach builds a candidate microcycle: number of sessions, intensity per session, rest day placement, and opt-outs for athletes managing a return from injury, then sees the projected effect before committing. Using each athlete's own load history, it calculates where their acute to chronic workload ratio would land under that plan and flags anyone who would move outside their normal range. The coach can build a second version, say five sessions instead of four, and compare both side by side for the same squad. It does not prescribe a better plan. It shows the consequence of the one being considered, so the trade-off between fixture demands and individual load is visible before the week starts rather than after.
Who it is for
Strength and conditioning coaches and sports scientists building the week's plan, sponsored by the Head of Performance who wants load decisions checked against data rather than feel.
Possible first version
A single planning screen covering one squad and one week at a time, with historical load imported from a CSV export of the GPS platform's data rather than a live feed. The coach enters planned sessions and intensity by hand; the tool computes projected acute to chronic workload ratio per athlete and colour-codes anyone outside their normal range. Up to three scenarios can be saved and compared side by side. Out of scope for version one: any live integration with the GPS or wearable platform, automatic fixture import, and multi-squad planning.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 3-5 week first release
- Roles involved
- Strength & conditioning coach, Head of Performance, Sports scientist
- Relevant to
- Professional club, Collegiate athletics, Academy & youth, Women's league
- Systems in play
- GPS and wearable tracking platforms, Spreadsheets, Athlete management systems
- Product framing
- Test or simulate
Questions we get asked
How much historical load data does it need before the projections are useful?
Enough to establish a rolling baseline for each athlete, typically several weeks of consistent GPS or wearable data covering both hard and easy weeks. A squad with patchy tracking history, or players newly signed or coming back from a long injury layoff, will get thinner projections for those individuals until more sessions are logged. The tool flags where the baseline is too short to trust rather than showing a confident number built on too little data.
We already read the fixture list and ease off before a congested week. Why do we need a screen for that?
The fixture list tells you the week is congested. It does not tell you which individual athletes are already carrying elevated load going into it, because that comparison happens in a separate system, if it happens at all. The whiteboard captures team-level judgement; this adds the athlete-level check underneath it. If your squad is small enough that one person tracks every athlete's recent load from memory, the extra screen probably is not worth the time.
Does this replace the reporting we already get from the GPS platform?
No. The GPS platform remains the record of what actually happened; this tool works from an export of that data to model what has not happened yet. It answers a different question: not what the athlete carried last week, but what the athlete would carry if the plan under consideration were run. Version one does not write anything back to the GPS platform or change how its reports work.
What happens if the plan changes on the morning of a session, after a scenario has already been approved?
It deliberately does not try to keep up with that. This is a planning tool for shaping the week ahead, not a live in-session system, so a same-day change, an athlete withdrawn or a session moved for weather, is not reflected automatically and the scenario is not rebuilt in real time. Re-running the affected scenario with the new inputs takes a few minutes, and that stays a manual step for whoever owns the plan that day.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
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