Season Starting Part 2

Last week, we talked about why the first few weeks of a season are the riskiest stretch for overuse problems.

Not because of any single hard practice. Because of how fast the workload ramps up before a player's body has caught up. So here's the natural next question.

How do you actually catch a spike before it turns into a problem?

Not by watching one practice, but by looking at the pattern across a week.

A hard practice isn't a bad thing. Bodies are built to adapt to hard days. That's how players get faster, stronger, and more game-ready. The problem isn't intensity. It's stacking hard days on top of each other without enough lower days in between. Without that recovery, the work never gets absorbed. It just piles up.

Here's where Load and Energy Ratio become useful together.

Load tells you how much total work a player did in a session. That's the volume side.

Energy Ratio tells you how much of that work was spent actually striding and pushing, versus gliding and coasting. That's the effort-quality side.

Neither number means much on its own. A high Load day could be a great, purposeful hard practice. Or it could be the third hard day in a row with no recovery in sight. You can't tell the difference from one number. You can tell the difference by looking at the trend across five or six days.

Here's what looking at the trend versus a single practice actually looks like.

A Normal, Healthy Week

Load climbs Monday and Tuesday, then dips on Wednesday for a lighter or recovery-focused day. It climbs again Thursday and Friday into a game. Energy Ratio stays consistent the whole time. The player is pushing about as hard Friday as they were Monday. That's a week the body can absorb and grow from.

A Week Trending Toward a Problem

Load climbs every single day with no dip. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, each one higher than the last, straight into a weekend tournament. Meanwhile Energy Ratio starts strong Monday and quietly drops by Thursday.

The player is still moving through drills and logging the same time on ice. They're just not pushing the way they were three days earlier. Rising Load paired with falling Energy Ratio is often the earliest sign of fatigue building up, showing up before a player even says they're tired.

Neither number is good or bad by itself on any given day. The trend across the week is what tells you whether a player is adapting or accumulating fatigue.

The best time to catch a workload problem is before it becomes a missed week or a performance plateau nobody can explain. That only happens if someone is looking at the full week. Not just today's practice.

Coming up in Part 3: All of this only works if you know what normal actually looks like for a given player. A Load number that's totally fine for one skater might be a red flag for another. Next week, how to build that baseline in the first two weeks of the season, before you need it.

See you next week,
Team HELIOS