Acute:chronic training loads in tennis: which metrics should we monitor?

Recently, Pluim and Drew1 provided tips for managing loads to help reduce injury risk in tennis. A central premise was the importance for assessing the acute:chronic loads—a concept to understand that the rate of change towards high weekly loads is more problematic (ie, increases injury risk) than simply performing high loads. In general, activities performed by athletes can be viewed as stress (ie, external loads like running distances or the number of accelerations/decelerations performed) and strain (ie, internal loads like heart rate, blood lactate). Thus, metrics from several domains are necessary to comprehensively quantify training and competition loads; however, there is a paucity of literature describing these indicators for tennis across the developmental spectrum. This knowledge gap limits the ability to identify which key metrics should be targeted within a systematic monitoring plan and subsequently used to track the acute:chronic loads in tennis, thus...