[3-minute read]

Whether you work with elite athletes or regular people who just want to improve their health and fitness, there are many benefits of monitoring well-being for both coaches and their clients and athletes. But what is it and why should you be doing it? 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 to both the coach and the client or athlete. Before we discuss that, let’s understand a little more about it…

What is well-being monitoring?

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 the internal load (i.e. rate of perceived exertion and wellness markers) of an athlete’s training in response to the external load.

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.

What are the benefits of monitoring well-being?

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 of monitoring well-being including:

1 / Educating and empowering

Monitoring their well-being will help your clients and athletes become more self-aware and recognise how their body reacts to the physical and psychological stressors in their lives. This increased self-awareness will teach them how to deal with these stressors and help them become more autonomous when it comes to their own personal recovery.

2 / Opening up lines of communication

Well-being monitoring is a great way to open up a communication channel with your clients and athletes that previously weren’t there. This allows you to see how they’re reacting to your training program along with other stressors in their lives, of which you would otherwise have been unaware.

3 / Providing actionable training insights

Insights into how each individual is reacting to your program can be used to personalize their program and manage their training load on any given day to achieve optimal results.

4 / Providing actionable lifestyle insights

Insights into other areas of your client’s and athlete’s life that may be affecting their recovery and performance can be invaluable. They can highlight areas that need attention in order to give them the edge.

5 / Preventing over-training

Well-being monitoring can identify over-training early so that you have the time to react before your clients and athletes suffer burnout, illness, or worse, injury. This will minimize missed training sessions and downtime allowing you to make sure your clients and athletes are always in peak condition.

6 / Improving performance, getting better results

All of the above combined will go towards ensuring your clients /athletes are at their peak both physically and mentally. Allowing them to train and perform at optimum levels, and reach those all-important goals.

Summary

Well-being monitoring is a subjective measure of perceived well-being that can be used to measure an individual’s response to physical and psychological stressors.

Whether you work with elite athletes or people who just want to improve their health and fitness there are many benefits of monitoring well-being – helping them identify how their body reacts to stressors and teaching them how to deal with them; opening up a powerful communication channel between you and your client or athlete; providing actionable training and lifestyle insights; identifying over-training early enough to take action and prevent downtime; and most importantly helping you ensure that your clients and athletes are at their peak both physically and mentally, so they can get that all-important edge and reach their goals.