I built the calculator so you do not have to make ACWR into a statistics project.
You need two things.
What you did recently.
What a normal week has looked like.
Then the calculator compares them.
Step 1: enter the last seven days
Start with today and work backward.
For every training day, enter the session length and how hard the session felt overall.
Rest day?
Zero.
Do not invent twenty minutes because you walked around the grocery store.
The goal is describing training.
Use the effort for the whole session
This is where people overthink it.
If the workout was 60 minutes and the overall session felt like a 6 out of 10, the load is 360 units.
60 x 6.
That is it.
You are not trying to assign a separate RPE to every warm-up set, water break, and minute on the treadmill.
I want a consistent way to compare the size of one training day with another.
Running and lifting can both go in
This is why effort times duration is useful for a hybrid athlete.
Miles cannot describe bench day.
Tonnage cannot describe intervals.
Session load gives both a common scale.
Just remember that the scale does not make the sessions physiologically identical.
A hard run and a hard upper-body day can land on similar numbers and still leave you tired in different places.
Step 2: describe a normal week
The calculator needs something to compare the last seven days with.
So tell it what training usually looks like.
How many days?
How long are the sessions?
How hard are they, roughly?
Do not use the hardest week you have ever survived.
Use something that actually represents your recent normal.
Step 3: read the ratio without turning it into a horoscope
Say the calculator gives you 1.30.
That means recent workload is about 30 percent above the baseline used in the calculation.
Useful.
Now look at the athlete.
Was the harder week planned?
Are you performing normally?
How is sleep?
Are easy runs still easy?
Are normal lifting loads moving the way they should?
The ratio helps you ask better questions.
It does not answer all of them.
Do not chase a perfect ACWR
I do not want somebody lowering training just to make a dashboard number prettier.
Training has to increase sometimes.
A race will make a week look different.
A hard block will make a week look different.
The useful thing is seeing that the dose changed, then deciding whether you are handling it.
If you want the bigger explanation and the limitations of the metric, read ACWR and Training Load.