[3-minute read]

Whether you’re an elite athlete or a regular person who likes to keep fit, you may have heard of well-being monitoring. But what is it and why should you be monitoring your well-being?

In recent years, well-being monitoring has begun to make its way from elite sports into the mainstream as more fitness and health professionals, and organisations spot the benefits it can have for both the coach and the client or athlete. Before we explore the benefits of monitoring your well-being, let’s understand a little more about it…

What is well-being monitoring?

Well-being monitoring is a subjective measure of an individual’s physical and psychological well-being. It measures an individual’s response to their training program and the other stressors in their everyday lives, such as work, studies, relationships, etc.

It can take many different forms, paper-based or digital like RYPT, and have varying degrees of depth and convenience, from well-established and thorough psychometric questionnaires like POMS and RESTQ-Sport, to simply keeping a diary. Advances in sports technology have resulted in the development of cutting-edge athlete monitoring tools (e.g. online platforms) to provide coaches with subjective information detailing their client’s and athlete’s well-being.

Why should I care about well-being monitoring?

Multiple studies indicate that levels of perceived well-being reflect an individual’s response to their training program and other stressors in their lives. For this reason and more, it can have huge benefits for individuals who monitor it including:

1 / Learning about the art of recovery

Everyone reacts differently to physical and psychological stressors and therefore our perceived well-being can vary greatly. By monitoring your well-being, you will learn a great deal about how your own body responds to these stressors, and also about how to optimize your recovery to deal with these responses effectively.

2 / Increasing self-awareness and autonomy

Increased self-awareness and understanding of your body will help you become more autonomous in dealing with your own recovery.

3 / Improving communication with your coach

Keeping your coach informed about how you’re reacting to your training program, how you’re recovering, and how other factors in your life are affecting you. This will help them individualize your program, optimize your training load on any given day, and identify other areas of your lifestyle that may need attention in order to give you the edge.

4 / Preventing over-training

Monitoring your well-being can identify over-training early so that you and your coach can react to prevent burnout, illness, and injury. This will minimize missed training sessions and downtime allowing you to maintain your peak condition.

5 / Improving performance, getting better results

All of the above will lead to you being in peak condition both physically and mentally. Allowing you to train and perform at optimum levels, and reach those all-important goals.

Summary

Well-being monitoring is a subjective measure of your perceived well-being that can be used to measure your response to physical and other stressors in your life.

Whether you’re an elite athlete or someone who just likes to keep fit it can have many benefits – helping you learn about how your body reacts to stressors and how to deal with them; increasing your self-awareness; improving communication with your coach; prevent over-training, and most importantly helping you perform at your peak both physically and mentally, so you can get that all-important edge and reach your goals.