Loved your appearance on this podcast, the interviewer was asking excellent questions that made it easy for me to refer people to it and have them receive practical application from it. I did have one question raised from it. You mentioned that we see increased injury rate in the research when going below a 0.8 Acute to Chronic workload ratio or above a 1.3 A:C. I understand going above a 1.3 A:C ratio, but going below a 0.8 surprised me and I was wondering if you could shed some light on why the injury rate increases when this happens. The only reason that I could think of is the subject becoming detrained, but I didn’t know how immediate the increase in injury risk occurred.
Excellent podcast. Well worth the listen.
and probably elsewhere.
Thanks Nathan, glad the podcast was helpful. Josh did an excellent job leading the interview.
Regarding A:C Ratios - check out this article by Tim Gabbett, The training—injury prevention paradox: should athletes be training smarter and harder? https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/50/5/273 (open access).
Basically, as you mentioned, it does have to do with being under-trained. In essence, we didn’t adequately prepare the athlete for the demand of sport and therefore place them at an increaesd risk from a tissue tolerance level. This is a U-shape approach to injury risk reduction. For a detailed examination of this topic, see Eckard et al: The Relationship Between Training Load and Injury in Athletes: A Systematic Review - PubMed.