NBA teams also use models with “red zone” types of indicators, although it can be a bit tricky to estimate some of the factors – we don’t know exactly what the pace of the game will be or what demands will be placed on a player defensively, and those can have significant variance. However, one particular model adapted from Australian rules football has become a popular guidepost for determining if players are overloaded and moving into a threatening range, injury-wise. The basic idea is that your acute load (i.e. in the past X days) shouldn’t be more than 150 per cent of your sustained load (i.e. what you’ve done over the past Y days, which is usually about three or four times X). You can build yourself up to handle greater and greater loads (like marathon runners do) but short-term spikes massively increase the injury risk.