What is the ramp rate in Base?

This week's endurance minutes compared against the average of the previous four weeks. It is the standard acute-to-chronic comparison, expressed as a ratio, and it answers whether you are increasing load faster than you have adapted to.

Why minutes rather than miles?

Because an hour is an hour. Ten miles of easy running and ten miles of hilly trail running take very different times and impose very different loads, and distance treats them as identical. Minutes also make running and cycling commensurable in a way distance never can.

What ramp rate is safe?

There is no single safe number, and Base does not pretend otherwise. The acute-to-chronic literature is genuinely contested, and the widely quoted thresholds have been challenged on statistical grounds. What the ratio is reliably good for is spotting a large jump, which is a different and much more defensible claim than predicting injury.

Does lifting count toward the ramp rate?

No. It measures endurance minutes only. Lifting dose is measured separately as weekly sets per muscle, because they are different capacities in different units. They do share one recovery budget, which is why both are shown against it rather than pooled into one number.

My ramp rate spiked because I was ill last month. Is that a problem?

It means the comparison has a low baseline rather than that this week was excessive. A ratio is only as meaningful as the four weeks behind it, and a disrupted block makes it read high for reasons that have nothing to do with what you did this week. Read the underlying minutes alongside it.

Read Your Endurance Ramp Rate

Why minutes

An hour is an hour.

Ten miles of flat easy running and ten miles of hilly trail take very different times and impose very different loads, and a distance-based measure calls them identical. Minutes also make running and cycling commensurable, which distance cannot — ten miles on a bike and ten miles on foot are not comparable in any useful sense.

this week            310 min
previous four weeks  248, 265, 240, 271  → mean 256
ramp                 310 ÷ 256 = 1.21

What the ratio is actually good for

Here the honest answer matters more than a confident one.

The acute-to-chronic workload ratio has been widely adopted and then substantially challenged. The specific thresholds that circulate — the "danger zone" numbers — have been criticised on statistical grounds, including the way the acute period sits inside the chronic one and how the ratio behaves at low chronic loads. Treating any particular value as a line between safe and unsafe is not supported.

So Base shows the ratio and does not attach an injury prediction to it.

What it is reliably good for is spotting a large jump. A week at 1.6 is not a diagnosis, but it is a fact about your training you should have consciously decided rather than discovered afterwards. That is a much weaker claim than the one the ratio is often used for, and it is defensible.

Reading it properly

Always read the underlying minutes alongside the ratio, because a ratio hides its own denominator.

Situation	Ratio	What it actually means
Steady block, small increase	~1.1	Working as intended
Return after illness	High	Low baseline, not a big week
Taper	Low	Intended
Big week after a big block	~1.2	Fine — the base supports it
Big week after two easy weeks	High	The jump is real

The illness row is the one that catches people. Four disrupted weeks produce a low chronic average, and a return to normal training reads as a spike when nothing unusual happened this week.

Endurance and lifting are not pooled

The ramp rate covers endurance minutes only. Lifting dose is weekly sets per muscle, in entirely different units.

Base never combines them, and the reason is the app's central premise rather than a technical limitation: they are different capacities, and a blended number could not answer either question. What they do share is one recovery budget, and showing both against it is precisely the job.

The practical consequence is that a rising ramp rate is a reason to look at your lifting, not just your running. If the readiness banner starts firing during a big endurance week, the endurance volume is the more likely cause — and cutting lifting volume while endurance minutes keep climbing is not a deload, it is a swap.

Growing endurance volume without a spike

The mechanism the ratio describes is real even where the thresholds are contested: adaptation lags load, and the gap between them is where problems live.

Practically:

Increase weekly minutes gradually rather than in jumps
Add duration to easy sessions before adding hard ones
Take a lighter week roughly every fourth
After a break, rebuild rather than resuming at the old volume

That last one is where the ratio earns its place. Returning at your previous volume after two weeks off is exactly the pattern it flags, and it is a genuinely common way to get hurt.

Common mistakes

Treating a threshold value as a rule. The evidence does not support it and Base does not claim it.

Reading the ratio without the minutes. A ratio with a broken denominator is not informative.

Adding hard sessions to raise volume. Duration on easy sessions is the low-cost way to add minutes.

Ignoring lifting when the ramp is high. One recovery budget, two demands.

Panicking at a taper's low ratio. It is supposed to be low.

Chasing a steady 1.1. The ratio is a diagnostic, not a target. Training blocks are meant to have shape.

What to do next

Look at your ramp rate alongside this week's total minutes. If the ratio is high because the previous four weeks were disrupted, note that and carry on — if it is high because this week genuinely was much bigger, plan next week lighter.