Do you Play or Do you Train? Insights From Individual Sports for Training Load and Injury Risk Management in Team Sports Based on Individualization

[EN] The understanding of the potential causes of musculoskeletal injuries in any competitive sport needs to address their multifactorial nature, which results from complex associations among different external conditions and modifiable and non-modifiable intrinsic risk factors (Drew and Purdam, 2016; Kalkhoven et al., 2020a). In this context, the cause of any non-contact injury merely results from a sum of loads generating a force that exceeds the limit supported by the respective biological tissue (Zernicke and Whiting, 2008). Consequently, it has been suggested that a poor load management is a major risk factor for injury in sport settings (Gabbett, 2016). One novel monitoring tool for injury risk management is the acute: chronic workload ratio (ACWR). The ACWR is currently in the spot light of sport sciences (Griffin et al., 2020; Maupin et al., 2020). While some emerging evidence suggests that it is a valid method to identify an increased injury risk (Andrade et al., 2020), other authors have pointed out its methodological limitations and even questioned its validity (Impellizzeri et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020). Proponents of the ACWR approach argue that athletes are at greater risk of sustaining a time-loss injury when the ACWR is higher relative to a lower or moderate ACWR (Andrade et al., 2020). In other words, the ACWR helps to identify critical windows in terms of elevated injury risk based on imbalanced training loading as for example sudden spike loads (Bowen et al., 2020)