Load and Wellness Monitoring in Sports: The Relationship Between Different Metrics

About this Research Topic

Background

It is well known that load and wellness monitoring of training/competition are necessary to optimize athletic performance and they have been conducted over the years. On the one hand, load can be divided in two dimensions: internal (e.g., perceived exertion and heart rate) and external (e.g., running and accelerometry based measures). On the other hand, wellness or well-being can include different categories such as fatigue, quality of sleep, muscle soreness, mood, and stress which are usually collected by questionnaires.

However, the literature is not consensual in demonstrating the relationship between load and wellness measures. Moreover, the majority of the published research avoids revealing information about training practices and methodologies. This is even more concerning when different metrics of the same variables are used. One example could be using rating of perceived exertion and metrics of monotony, strain, acute:chronic workload ratio calculated through rating of perceived exertion. Another example could be using relative or absolute data. Such approaches are difficult to put in practice in the field of each sport.

The aim of this research topic is to provide information on load and wellness monitoring in different sports and analyzing the relationship between the different dimensions. It is intended to provide more details on training methodologies as well as to provide more clarifications on when using different metrics and how to interpret them.

The present research topic will accept original research and systematic reviews from all sports. It is hypothesized that this topic will generate relevant information for several sports to increase performance levels while clarifying training methodologies and the application of different metrics.

Keywords: fitness, injury, match load, sports training, sports performance, training load, wellbeing

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