Monitoring Fatigue Status in Elite Team-Sport Athletes: Implications for Practice

Abstract

The increase in competition demands in elite team sports over recent years has prompted much attention from researchers and practitioners to the monitoring of adaptation and fatigue in athletes. Monitoring fatigue and gaining an understanding of athlete status may also provide insights and beneficial information pertaining to player availability, injury, and illness risk. Traditional methods used to quantify recovery and fatigue in team sports, such as maximal physical-performance assessments, may not be feasible to detect variations in fatigue status throughout competitive periods. Faster, simpler, and nonexhaustive tests such as athlete self-report measures, autonomic nervous system response via heart-rate-derived indices, and to a lesser extent, jump protocols may serve as promising tools to quantify and establish fatigue status in elite team-sport athletes. The robust rationalization and precise detection of a meaningful fluctuation in these measures are of paramount importance for practitioners working alongside athletes and coaches on a daily basis. There are various methods for arriving at a minimal clinically important difference, but these have been rarely adopted by sport scientists and practitioners. The implementation of appropriate, reliable, and sensitive measures of fatigue can provide important information to key stakeholders in team-sport environments. Future research is required to investigate the sensitivity of these tools to fundamental indicators such as performance, injury, and illness.Keywords: training, performance, wellness, recovery, injury, illness Elite team-sport athletes, particularly those in the professional football codes, are exposed to high competition loads, particularly in recent years. These high loads reflect a number of factors, including an increased frequency of domestic competitions, particularly for higher-level athletes, as well as a higher intensity of competition due to enhanced player preparation strategies. 1 Higher loads may also result from the increased demands of international competition during both the domestic season and the off-season period.An increased availability of athletes for selection, as a result of a reduction in injuries, substantially increases a team's chance of success. 2 Therefore, injury prevention strategies are fundamental to the work of the athlete's support team. Routine modifications in training load (frequency, duration, intensity) occur during the training cycle and these subsequently increase or decrease fatigue. Management of fatigue is important in mediating adaption to training and ensuring the athlete is prepared for competition, 3 as well as for reducing the athletes' susceptibility to nonfunctional overreaching, injury, and illness. 4 The importance of managing athlete fatigue has led to an increase in interest in monitoring athlete loads, particularly in terms of the measures which may offer insights into whether the athlete is adapting positively or negatively to the collective stresses of training and competition. In the pr...

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