Sports Medicine · Collaborative Research · 2024

ACWR & Injury Risk in DII Women's Lacrosse

Reviewing the Acute:Chronic Workload Ratio (ACWR) literature alongside in-season data to test whether ACWR meaningfully predicts injury incidence in DII women's lacrosse athletes, in collaboration with DPT students at Seton Hill.

Sports MedicineBiomechanics Tukey HSDStatistical programming Data analysisData modeling PresentationsCritical thinking

ACWR over time for four athletes — rolling acute:chronic workload ratio with upper (1.5) and lower (0.8) risk thresholds, 2023 and 2024 seasons

In-season ACWR trajectories from session-level training load: each panel tracks one athlete across 2023 and 2024 against commonly cited risk bands (green = 0.8 lower, red = 1.5 upper).

Approach

Literature scan on ACWR thresholds and limitations across team sports.
Built rolling acute (7-day) and chronic (28-day) workload measures from session-level training data (see figure above).
Used Tukey HSD post-hoc testing to compare injured vs. non-injured groups across ACWR bands.
Discussed methodological caveats: small sample sizes, multi-collinearity between load metrics, and the difficulty of isolating ACWR's signal from confounders like sleep and prior injury history.

Outcome

A more cautious read of ACWR as a stand-alone injury predictor in this population.
Recommendations for what to log going forward (sleep, wellness, position-specific load) so a future study has a stronger feature set.

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