One load number cannot hold barbells and sprints

Summing gym work and field running into a single unit hides the substitution that changes what the body is doing.

A heavy lower-body session and a running session get converted into the same currency, added, and reported as the week's total. That conversion is where the information dies.

The two sessions stress different things. One loads tissue slowly under high force with long rests; the other loads it quickly, repeatedly, with impact. Bodies do not experience them as interchangeable, and the injuries that follow too much of each are not the same injuries. Yet in a single-unit system, cutting the running and adding squats can leave the total flat, and a flat total is read as a stable week. What actually happened is a substitution, and substitutions are the events most worth noticing because they are when a body meets something it has not been doing.

The conversion factors are also mostly invented. Duration multiplied by a difficulty rating gives you a number in arbitrary units, and the arithmetic of adding those units across modes assumes the scale means the same thing in a weights room and on a pitch, which is an assumption nobody has ever tested in a way that would survive being asked about it. A seven in the gym is not a seven in the last twenty minutes of a possession game.

What happens next is predictable. The total becomes the thing that is managed, and staff learn how to keep the total in range. Congested week? Trim the field session and keep the gym work, because the total stays acceptable either way. The metric has quietly started shaping the plan, and it is shaping it in a direction chosen by the conversion factor rather than by anyone's judgement about what the athlete needs.

I would keep three columns. Running volume, high-speed exposure, resistance work. Nobody is confused by three columns. The demand for one number comes from the meeting, not from the physiology, and meetings can read three lines if asked.

What you lose is the ability to say the week was a 1,240. What you gain is noticing that a player has done no high-speed running in nine days while his total looked normal all month.

That second thing is what the monitoring was installed to catch, and the single-unit total is very good at hiding it.