How to use Wellness Questionnaires in Athlete Performance Monitoring

How well athletes perform depend on a wide-range of factors. Wellness questionnaires play an important role in athlete performance monitoring, giving coaches up-to-date information on how an athlete is feeling and therefore, how well, or not they could perform. 

Wellness questionnaires are a way for athletes to evaluate and express their well-being. They can also give you, as a manager or coach, a better understanding of how your athletes feel about their performance, fitness, stamina, and the impact of recent training exercises or matches. 

Athlete feedback from these questionnaires will help you identify any problems that may exist in the athlete’s life or training plan. Wellness questionnaires can be used in many different contexts: post-training or competitive game debriefings, team meetings, and before or after traveling or injuries. 

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Why are wellness questionnaires important in perforce monitoring?

Having a clear understanding of your athletes’ wellness is an important part of any athlete performance monitoring program. Wellness questionnaires allow you to measure a wide range of factors, compare this to biometric data and data from other systems, and provide insight into how your athletes are feeling, thinking, and likely to perform. 

Wellness questionnaires are useful for screening athletes, and the answers to these questions can be integrated into operational monitoring systems. 

Why monitoring is integral to athletic outputs? 

There are numerous stakeholders involved with an athletes performance, including the athlete themselves, and each of them plays a role in how a professional sportsperson performs. 

• Sports coaches have to fit in practice sessions, competitions, film sessions, and more. 
• Strength and conditioning team members need to implement weight room sessions, speed sessions, and conditioning sessions. 
• Athletic trainers and other development staff need to support athletes through rehab sessions, injury recovery time, preparticipation screening, and the coverage of practice. 

Every stakeholder and participant can positively or negatively impact an athletes wellbeing. 

How can Coaches use Wellness Questionnaires?

Generally, wellness questionnaires are used for:

• Understanding an athlete’s wellbeing and their perception of it (mental, physical, etc.); 
• Identifying potential issues that may need addressing; 
• Developing a plan for improvement, including any non-training activities that would improve performance, such as coming off social media, dietary changes, or increasing the amount of sleep an athlete gets. 

How do wellness questionnaires help coaches understand athletes more effectively?

By answering questions about their wellbeing, athletes on your team can give you valuable insight into how they feel about the training program, competitive games, and other factors, and how these are affecting them.

To get started, ask your athletes to complete a wellness questionnaire at the beginning of each season. In most cases, wellness questionnaires are filled out several times every season; in some cases, as often as once every week. 

Make sure that you’re clear on what’s expected of them (i.e., why they need to answer these questions?) before sending out the questionnaire so they know what information is relevant. You may also want to check in with these same questions again mid-season if something has changed, such as an injury or illness affecting their ability to train effectively.

A wellness questionnaire is often considered subjective. Coaches also have access to an extensive range of subjective data too, such as information from biometric sensors, training sessions, and feedback from strength and conditioning specialists. Whereas, a wellness questionnaire is a way for an athlete to communicate as to whether they think something is wrong, what’s wrong, and what they feel needs to be done about it. 

Even if nothing is showing up from other sources, coaches need to take athlete input seriously. Otherwise, you risk overlooking something that’s important and can impact how an athlete performs, or even whether they get injured in a competitive game. 

How to create an effective wellness questionnaire? 

Coaches need to ask clear, unambiguous questions that offer streamlined and useful/actionable answers. Most wellness questionnaires should start with questions about: 

• Are you getting enough sleep? 
• How tired/fatigued have you been recently (especially if training has been intense, they’ve been injured, a competitive game is coming up, or they’ve recently competed in a tournament)?
• How is your mood been in the last week/few days? 
• How is your diet, are you eating and drinking the right things? 

All of these questions are subjective, but they give a coach the insights needed to understand how an athlete is feeling about their own bodies. You can then add other questions that are more subjective and connect to other data sources, such as about resting heart rates and other physical, data-backed signals. 

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How can coaches use this information for an operating performance system? 

Once you’ve got this information, coaches can use it to improve operational performance. In order to achieve that, you need a working system for taking data and doing something actionable with it to improve athlete performance. 

While wellness questionnaires aren’t a replacement for an athlete evaluation, they can provide valuable insight into your athletes. They can also help you determine if an athlete needs additional care or support outside of what is offered by the team and coaching staff. 

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