How to track your combined running and lifting load in a spreadsheet

Every training load app is doing the same arithmetic behind the interface. If you want to understand what your own number is made of, or you just don't want another account, you can build the whole thing in a spreadsheet in about twenty minutes. This is how.

I'm going to be honest about which parts are settled science and which parts are a judgement call, because that distinction is the entire reason to build this yourself. A number you assembled is a number you know the limits of.

The five columns

One row per session. That's it.

• Date · Type · Duration · Intensity · Load — the five columns
• 2026-03-02 · Run · 62 min · 148 avg HR · 18
• 2026-03-02 · Lift · 55 min · RPE 8 · 44
• 2026-03-03 · Bike · 95 min · 132 avg HR · 19

That the lift outscores both cardio sessions is not a typo. It is also not correct — it is the weighting problem in miniature, and there is a section on it below.

Duration is minutes. Intensity is whatever marker you have for that session type. Load is the number you calculate from the other two, and everything after this is about how to fill that last column.

Two sessions on one day get two rows. Don't merge them — you'll want to see the split later.

Scoring the cardio side

If your watch records heart rate, use TRIMP. The original is Banister's, and the version most people can compute by hand is Edwards': multiply the minutes spent in each of five HR zones by a weight of 1 to 5, and add them up.

A 62 minute run with 20 minutes in zone 2, 30 in zone 3 and 12 in zone 4:

(20 × 2) + (30 × 3) + (12 × 4) = 40 + 90 + 48 = 178

Divide by a constant to keep the numbers small if you like. The scale is arbitrary; what matters is that you use the same one everywhere. I divide by ten, which is where the 18 in the table above comes from.

If you don't have HR for a session, fall back to RPE × minutes and be consistent about it. A worked comparison of the three approaches is in TRIMP vs power vs RPE, and the arithmetic in more detail is in how to calculate TRIMP.

Scoring the lifting side

This is the half nobody's watch does, and it's why the whole exercise is worth it. Two options.

Session RPE. Rate the session 1–10 about half an hour after you finish, multiply by the duration in minutes. A 55 minute session at RPE 8 scores 440, or 44 on a scale divided by ten. Foster's method, it's been in the literature for decades, and it takes four seconds a session.

Tonnage. Sets × reps × weight, summed over the session. More objective, and it responds properly when you add weight to the bar. It also can't tell a heavy triple from a light set of twenty at the same tonnage, and it scores a deadlift day enormously higher than an upper-body day for reasons that have little to do with what you're carrying around afterwards. If you use tonnage, normalise it by body weight so the numbers stay comparable across a year in which your body weight changed.

I use tonnage where I have it and session RPE where I don't. Combining Strava and Hevy walks through the session-RPE method end to end, and why your watch ignores lifting explains why none of this arrives automatically.

Putting the two on one scale

Here's the part where I have to be straight with you: there is no principled conversion between a hard squat session and a two-hour tempo ride. They cost you something, both of them, but not in the same currency.

Any single-number system — mine included — is making a modelling choice at this step, not deriving a constant. What you can do is pick a weighting, write it down, and leave it alone long enough for the trend to mean something. A ratio that's consistently wrong is still useful; a ratio you keep adjusting is not.

The practical version: score a week you'd call normal, look at what fraction of the total the lifting represents, and ask whether that matches how the week felt. If leg day is coming out as 5% of your week, your weighting is too low. If it's coming out as half, it's too high. Adjust once, then stop.

The rolling columns

Add three more columns to a summary sheet with one row per day, where D is the daily load total:

• Acute (7 days) — SUM(D2:D8)
• Chronic (28 days) — the average of the last four weekly totals
• Ratio — Acute divided by Chronic

In practice the chronic column is easiest as a 28-day rolling sum divided by four, which puts it on the same weekly scale as the acute column:

Chronic = SUM(D2:D29) / 4

Then Ratio = Acute / Chronic. That's the acute:chronic workload ratio, and it needs 28 days of history before it says anything at all — which is the first thing that makes this annoying by hand.

Reading the ratio

The ratio describes how fast your recent work is running ahead of your established base. Four bands:

• Ramping down — recent work well below your base.
• Steady — recent work in line with your base.
• Sharp ramp — recent work meaningfully above your base.
• Spike — a large, fast jump.

Gabbett's work associates high acute:chronic ratios with higher injury incidence in team-sport populations, and the model has been argued over since — several groups have questioned the statistical handling and how well it transfers to individuals. So treat the ratio as a ramp-rate signal, one input among several, and not a prediction about you specifically. It is not medical advice.

The bands and the arguments against them are covered properly in ACWR for hybrid athletes, and there's a worked calculation in the ACWR calculator post. Citations are on the science FAQ.

Where the spreadsheet stops working

Three places, in the order you'll hit them.

Manual entry decays. Mine lasted about three weeks. It isn't discipline — it's that the row you most need is the one you're least likely to enter, because you enter it when you're tired.

The 28-day column needs 28 days. Starting today means the ratio tells you nothing until October, unless you backfill a month of sessions by hand from Strava.

Two sessions a day breaks the daily row. Solvable, but it's the point where the sheet starts growing helper columns.

If you get to that point and want it done for you, that's what I built LOAD for: it pulls the cardio side from Strava or Polar, takes the lifting side from Hevy or a manual log, backfills twelve weeks on connect so the chronic column is populated on day one, and publishes the formula it uses so you can check it against your sheet. Free for individual athletes, no card.

But build the sheet first. You'll argue with any app's number much more usefully once you've had to pick the weighting yourself.