Loadwell vs a spreadsheet
The real incumbent is not another product — it is a sheet, a group chat and a coach who remembers things. That setup is better than it gets credit for, and this page is about where it stops scaling rather than why it is wrong.
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What the manual workflow actually is
Very few coaches monitor recovery with nothing. The usual arrangement is a sheet in Google Sheets or Excel, check-ins over WhatsApp, athletes reading their own wearable scores, a coaching platform for programming, and a coach carrying most of the picture in their head.
That is a real system, and it has genuine advantages no software matches. It costs nothing. It is completely flexible. It is familiar to everyone involved. It is entirely under your control, with no vendor to depend on and no data anywhere you cannot reach. And for a small roster it is frequently the correct answer.
So the honest framing is not manual versus modern. It is where the effort goes, and at what roster size that effort stops being worth it.
Where the work sits
A spreadsheet can do almost everything in this table. The question is whether you are doing it, or something is doing it for you.
| Spreadsheet + messages | Loadwell | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Effectively free | From £24/month |
| Setup | Minutes, and you already know how | Invite athletes; baselines build over ~2 weeks |
| Flexibility | Total — any column you like | Fixed model, by design |
| Control of your data | Entirely yours | Yours, exportable as CSV |
| Collecting check-ins | Manual — you chase, you transcribe | Athletes submit directly, one screen |
| Wearable data | Athlete reads their app and tells you | Oura syncs automatically; other devices are not connected |
| Personal baselines | Possible with formulas, per athlete per metric | Automatic, rolling, per athlete |
| Spotting what changed today | You compare, every morning | Computed and surfaced |
| Prioritising the roster | You decide who to look at | Sorted by who moved |
| Explaining what moved | You work it out | Shown per athlete |
| Suggested next step | Your judgement | Recommended action plus a draft message you edit |
| Historical trends | Yes, if you keep it up | Weekly summary view |
| Ongoing admin | Grows with every athlete | Roughly flat |
| Best for | Small rosters, and coaches who like owning the system | Rosters too large to review one by one |
The arithmetic is what breaks, not the sheet
Data entry is not the problem people expect it to be. Athletes can fill in a shared form, and typing numbers is quick.
What breaks is the comparison. Knowing whether today is unusual for an athlete means holding their recent average in your head or maintaining formulas for every athlete and every metric. At ten athletes and four metrics that is forty judgements a morning, which is manageable. At thirty athletes it is a hundred and twenty, which is the point the daily habit quietly stops — usually around week three, and usually without anyone deciding to stop.
The failure is silent, and that is what makes it costly. The sheet still exists, athletes are still filling it in, and nobody notices that it stopped changing what the coach does.
Which suits you
- Keep the spreadsheet if
- your roster is small enough to review individually, you enjoy maintaining your own system, you want zero cost, or you need a bespoke structure no product will give you. This is a real answer and there is a free template on this site to make it a better one.
- Loadwell is worth a look if
- your roster has outgrown individual review, you have already built a sheet and watched it lapse, or the specific thing you want is for the comparison and prioritisation to happen without you.
- Neither, if
- you coach a handful of athletes in person every week. You already have better information than any monitoring system would give you.
What Loadwell does not do
It has no programming, scheduling, payments or client management, so it does not replace a coaching platform — it runs alongside one. Oura is the only live wearable integration; Garmin, WHOOP, Apple Health, TrainingPeaks, Strava, Polar and Coros are not connected, and training and nutrition context is whatever the athlete types in. If those gaps matter more than the prioritisation, a spreadsheet may genuinely serve you better today.
Frequently asked
- Can I just add formulas to my spreadsheet to do this?
- Largely, yes — a rolling average per athlete per metric and some conditional formatting gets you a fair way, and a coach who enjoys that will do well with it. The maintenance is the cost: new athletes mean new formulas, and a sheet that breaks quietly stops being trusted.
- Is Loadwell just a spreadsheet with a nicer interface?
- The presentation is not the difference. What it adds is the work you would otherwise do each morning — the per-athlete baseline, the deviation check across several signals, and the ordering of the roster by it.
- Can I export my data if I move back to a spreadsheet?
- Yes. CSV export is available, and it is a reasonable question to ask of anything holding your athletes' history.
- Do I have to stop using my spreadsheet?
- No. Plenty of coaches keep a sheet for things Loadwell deliberately does not hold — session detail, body weight, admin. It is not built to be the only place you write things down.
Try both honestly
The free spreadsheet template is on this site with no signup. If the daily comparison becomes the bottleneck, the trial is 14 days and needs no card.
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