A wellness questionnaire is a few questions each player answers before training: how they slept, how tired they are, whether anything hurts. It takes less than a minute and tells the coaching staff how each player is arriving at the session, something neither GPS nor the training plan can show.
Why it works
Self-reported measures reflect changes in training load with more sensitivity and consistency than many commonly used objective measures: that is the conclusion of a systematic review on the subject [1]. In professional football players, perceived fatigue tracked day-to-day changes in high-intensity running distance [2].
The idea is not new: in the mid-1990s, researchers were already proposing to track sleep, stress, fatigue and muscle soreness to spot overload [3], and today short wellness questionnaires are common practice in many sports [1].
The value is in reading the answers, not asking the questions
Asking is easy. The hard part is turning the whole squad's answers, every day, into decisions:
- Every player uses the scale their own way. A player who always answers "normal" is not worse off than one who always answers "good". What matters is the change from what is normal for that player, and that takes history and a calculation for each one.
- The warning has to arrive before the session, not in a spreadsheet someone checks on Monday.
- The answers have to be read against the load: a bad night after a match does not mean the same as a bad night in a quiet week.
That is where most coaching staffs who try it with forms and spreadsheets run out of time.
Why it fails with forms and spreadsheets
- Players do not see the point. If a player reports pain and nobody asks about it, next time they will say they feel perfect.
- It has automatic consequences. If a bad answer means being left out, the answers stop being honest.
- It is slow or awkward. If it cannot be answered in seconds on a phone, it gets dropped.
- There is no confidentiality. Health data is sensitive: only the people who need it should see it.
How it fits with everything else
Wellness tells you how the player arrives; session RPE tells you how the session went for them; GPS, what they did. Together they give a fairly complete picture, as we explain in the guide to training load monitoring.
Daily wellness with CTBrain
In CTBrain, each player answers the daily wellness questionnaire in the player app, in seconds: sleep, fatigue, muscle soreness, stress and mood, plus a map of pain areas for the medical staff. And the platform does the hard part, the reading:
- Automatic alerts when a player's wellness stays poor for several days in a row or when they stop answering.
- A combined alert when a player with a high load also reports poor wellness.
- Each player's wellness over recent days, alongside their load and GPS.
- Medical data, visible only to the medical staff the club approves.
References
- Saw AE, Main LC, Gastin PB. Monitoring the athlete training response: subjective self-reported measures trump commonly used objective measures: a systematic review. Br J Sports Med. 2016;50(5):281–291. doi:10.1136/bjsports-2015-094758
- Thorpe RT, Strudwick AJ, Buchheit M, Atkinson G, Drust B, Gregson W. Monitoring fatigue during the in-season competitive phase in elite soccer players. Int J Sports Physiol Perform. 2015;10(8):958–964. doi:10.1123/ijspp.2015-0004
- Hooper SL, Mackinnon LT. Monitoring overtraining in athletes: recommendations. Sports Med. 1995;20(5):321–327. doi:10.2165/00007256-199520050-00003