Load Management - Walking on Egg Shells

The whole concept of load management as it is being interpreted and implemented is beyond me. Frankly, it makes no sense. Call me old school, but isn’t good planning and training design that prepares the athlete for the rigors of competition what we are supposed to be doing? We have reduced the quality and intensity of training to meet magic numbers developed by flawed measurement devises based on artificial algorithms. We are walking on egg shells, afarid to push the athlete. Sometime in the process you have to train hard and push beyond your perceived limits in order to force adaptation. We are now well into our second generation of fragile athletes that are victims of underwork. Injures are not being reduced, although I have no stats to back this, it is my observation that severity of injuries has increased. There is a threshold of training that you must achieve to become competition hardened. For me fifty years into this journey it has been quite a simple proposition – do the necessary work that exceeds game demands, that meets the needs of the individual athletes, that has a transparent injury prevention component, emphasis fundamentals and never strays far from fundamentals of the sport and movement – this approach has produced injury free robust athletes ready to thrive in the chaos of competition. Load is planned and adjusted daily informed by the response of the athlete and the close observation of the coaches, seldom if ever is it driven exclusively by numbers. A healthy athlete should not be held out of competition – that is what we are training for, lest we forget.