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Full to the brim – Games

Learning game

Full to the brim

The load cup

Everything that acts on you flows into the same cup: stress, sleep, nutrition, training, daily life. What matters is not the single load but the sum – and whether enough drains away again.

  • 1Grey blocks are stress. They cannot be blocked and sink into the cup as lumps.
  • 2Tap green blocks (everyday movement): they fly to the nearest lump of stress and dissolve it.
  • 3Tap red blocks (nutrition) to fend them off. Let blue ones through (recovery) – they lower the level.
  • 4Press and hold amber blocks (training) and release inside the green window of the dose gauge. Too short does nothing, too long fills the cup.
  • 5Points are earned mainly inside the green band. If the cup overflows, the game is over.
Points0
Time0:00
Balance×1.0

The load cup

Tap the blocks directly on the playing field. Press and hold amber blocks.

What flows into the cup?

Stress fills the cup. Cannot be blocked.
Everyday movement tap – dissolves stress.
Training hold, release in the green window.
Nutrition tap – fend it off.
Recovery let it through – lowers the level.
Green band balance. Points are earned here.

The model behind it

The cup stands for the cumulative load acting on the body. Training volume, sleep, psychosocial strain, illness and nutrition all flow into the same vessel. That is why the same training session can be tolerated well in a calm week and be too much in a demanding one.

What decides is the dose. Load is neither poison nor cure – the same stimulus builds you up or overwhelms you depending on its amount. In sport, injury risk depends less on the absolute size of the load than on rapid spikes: those who build up gradually and recover well end up tolerating considerably more.

An almost empty cup is no goal either. Tissue, circulation and nervous system adapt to what is regularly asked of them – without stimuli, load tolerance falls. The aim is not an empty cup but a bigger one.

And the model remains a simplification: the cup has no fixed size. It grows with training and shrinks during phases of poor sleep, illness or high strain. This is exactly why “too much” is individual – and changes over time. How load is best measured is, incidentally, contested in sports science: widely used metrics such as the acute-to-chronic workload ratio are now regarded as methodologically questionable.

Sources

The numbers in the game are chosen freely and serve illustration. The underlying relationships draw on:

  1. Soligard T, Schwellnus M, Alonso JM, et al. How much is too much? (Part 1) International Olympic Committee consensus statement on load in sport and risk of injury. Br J Sports Med. 2016;50(17):1030–1041. doi:10.1136/bjsports-2016-096581.
  2. Windt J, Gabbett TJ. How do training and competition workloads relate to injury? The workload–injury aetiology model. Br J Sports Med. 2017;51(5):428–435. doi:10.1136/bjsports-2016-096040.
  3. Gabbett TJ. The training–injury prevention paradox: should athletes be training smarter and harder? Br J Sports Med. 2016;50(5):273–280. doi:10.1136/bjsports-2015-095788.
  4. Impellizzeri FM, Woodcock S, Coutts AJ, Fanchini M, McCall A, Vigotsky AD. What role do chronic workloads play in the acute to chronic workload ratio? Time to dismiss ACWR and its underlying theory. Sports Med. 2020;50(12):2075–2081. doi:10.1007/s40279-020-01378-6.
  5. Ivarsson A, Johnson U, Andersen MB, Tranaeus U, Stenling A, Lindwall M. Psychosocial factors and sport injuries: meta-analyses for prediction and prevention. Sports Med. 2017;47(2):353–365. doi:10.1007/s40279-016-0578-x.
  6. Milewski MD, Skaggs DL, Bishop GA, et al. Chronic lack of sleep is associated with increased sports injuries in adolescent athletes. J Pediatr Orthop. 2014;34(2):129–133. doi:10.1097/BPO.0000000000000151.
  7. Khan KM, Scott A. Mechanotherapy: how physical therapists’ prescription of exercise promotes tissue repair. Br J Sports Med. 2009;43(4):247–252. doi:10.1136/bjsm.2008.054239.
  8. Booth FW, Roberts CK, Laye MJ. Lack of exercise is a major cause of chronic diseases. Compr Physiol. 2012;2(2):1143–1211. doi:10.1002/cphy.c110025.

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