Understanding the Acute Chronic Workload

The acute:chronic workload ratio is simply a number that shows you how much work you have done this week versus how much work on average you have done over the past month.  

Athletes: your current acute, chronic scores are found on your analytics home page. 

What do I need to do?

If the coach has asked you to complete an RPE please fill this in accurately after the event as this is your part of the puzzle that needs completing alongside the session duration. Your coach will note down how long the session was, or how long you participated in the session. The combination of duration e.g 60 mins and your RPE 5 = a workload score of 300 (60x5).

The Ratio

We simply divide the acute score (your last 7 days of work) by the chronic score (past month score) to achieve an acute:chronic ratio.

The optimum ratio is between 0.8 and 1.2

- Injury risk becomes moderately higher with a ratio of 1.2-1.5

- Over 1.5 the risk is high.

Similarly, a ratio below 0.8 could indicate too much of a drop-off in load, meaning a future week is likely to spike the load too much. 

In MVP Analytics values 0.8-1.2 are green, 1.21-1.49 are orange, 1.5+ are red and below 0.8 are white. This should allow you to quickly see if athletes are on track with their training load. 

The workload tab has a very detailed overview of your current workload and your acute:chronic ratio, plus past ratios from previous weeks.

Event Workloads

A list of all the events you have been invited to, their duration, your RPE score and the resulting workload.

This Week

If you have more than one event in a day then the cumulative workload will show next to the day.

Typical Workload By Day

Allows you to compare 'this week's workloads to the typical, you can see this was a workload score of 90 on Monday, compared with 300 as the average of the previous Monday. This means you have had a much easier Monday than usual, this particular event was rated a 2 RPE but was 90 mins long (see: 2021-09-27 Testing Session) so we can gauge that the reason for the reduced workload was because the session was less intense rather than shortened.

The Graph

This can be viewed monthly or daily, follow this drilling arrows tutorial to learn more, you can follow the trends of duration and RPE and make similar interpretations about whether a workload spike has been caused by intensity (increased RPE) or duration (session time). 

Acute Chronic By Week

Shows each acute and chronic workload and the ratio achieved for each calendar year week.