Load and capacity: why the pain shows up now

Same route, same shoes, same weight on the bar. And yet your knee has been nagging since last week. Because nothing changed in your training, you start looking for the fault in your technique.

It is rarely there. A complaint appears the moment the sum of everything your body has to process rises above what it can handle that week. Two quantities, then. You track one of them closely, while the other moves without you noticing.

Two quantities, one outcome

Load is everything that physically reaches your tissue: your training sessions, but also your working day, the stairs, the shopping, the kilometres in your shoes and that hour on your feet at a reception. Capacity is what your body can take of that load right now without damage.

As long as load stays under capacity, what you do makes you stronger. Once load sits above it week after week, a complaint follows. Nothing dramatic has to happen; the sum does the work.

Which spot picks up the bill is a separate question. We wrote about that earlier in biotensegrity: why your body is a network. Load spreads across the whole web of muscle, tendon and fascia, and the link that runs out of compensation first is the one that starts to complain. That is rarely where the load came in.

Capacity is not a fixed number

Your capacity changes by the week, sometimes by the day. Sleep is the biggest dial: a run of short nights lowers what you can handle while your programme stays exactly the same. Sustained pressure at work does the same, because your system is already running in a higher gear. That is the work we do in burn-out and stress. Eating too little during a fat loss phase eats into your recovery, which is why nutrition and lifestyle sits beside the training with us instead of behind it.

Your programme did not get heavier that week. Your capacity dropped for a while.

The load you forget to count

In your head your load is three training sessions. In your tissue it is your entire week. Three days standing at a trade fair, a house move, a child who wants picking up again and again, twenty kilometres of walking on a city break: it all counts.

The same goes for quiet changes. New shoes, a different surface, a saddle set higher, a week on a hotel mattress. So change one thing at a time when you expand. Running more? Keep your strength training as it is. Adding weight? Leave the number of sets alone. That way you know which variable caused a complaint when one shows up.

Getting stronger means building capacity

There is one way to raise your capacity: with load. Tissue adapts to the force placed on it. Cells in tendon, muscle, cartilage and bone translate mechanical tension into the production of new, sturdier tissue.¹ The stimulus you can just about handle is the one that makes you stronger.

Rest is not an antidote in this but a part of it: it lowers the load for a while so the adaptation can happen. Let the rest run on too long and your capacity drops with it. So build in small steps, certainly after a spell without training or after an injury.² How much recovery belongs in between, we set out in how much rest do you need between training sessions. In our physical training that build-up sits in blocks, with a fixed moment to evaluate before anything is added.

When you do scale back

Four signals that load has risen above capacity: pain that builds during the session instead of fading, pain that is worse the next morning than straight after training, a complaint still there 24 hours later, and strength that drops away for no clear reason.

Scaling back means lowering the load to the level that does feel right. Often that is less volume at the same intensity, or the same exercise through a smaller range of motion. If the complaint is still there after two weeks, it needs a diagnosis. We then hand over to physiotherapy and the build-up carries on alongside it in injury recovery.

How we steer this at de Werf

In the intake we map your whole week: your work, your commute, your sleep and what you do besides training. That tells us how much load is already there before you walk into the studio. Your programme fills the room that is left.

After that we steer on what happens in your life. A busy month calls for less volume, not for a different goal. The measurements and the session logs show whether your capacity is growing along with what we put on it.

A real example from our practice

"I trained four times a week and that went well for years. Then an acquisition landed on my desk, I was down to five hours of sleep and my lower back started complaining. My first reflex was to train harder and shake it off. For eight weeks we cut the number of sets and swapped out the heavy pulling exercise. Same frequency, far less trouble. Once the acquisition was done, we could put more on it within six weeks than before."

Do you know if you are doing too much or too little?

Schedule an intake at de Werf in The Hague, with no obligation. We map what your week adds up to in load, what you can handle right now and where the build-up should start.

Schedule an intake

Read also:
Our coaching in physical training and injury recovery.

Sources:
¹ Khan and Scott - Mechanotherapy, British Journal of Sports Medicine
² Thuisarts.nl - Preventing a sports injury