Wellness questionnaires

Wellness questionnaires are a subjective psychological assessment to determine how athletes are coping with the training load (Scott et al, 2016). Excessive exercise can have a negative effect on measures of wellness. In sport, the questionnaire is usually customised to include measures of perceived fatigue, general wellness, muscle soreness and sleep duration. An example of a wellness questionnaire that could be used in rugby is presented in the figure below (Mclean et al, 2010).

Wellness questionnaires are cheap and easy to implement with a large group. Coaches can assess the results very quickly and use it to inform their training, which is what a good monitoring tool needs to do (Scott et al, 2016). Wellness will be related to other factors in the player’s life so a bad score may not be due to excess training but can still indicate that they may be under extra stress which can effect recovery and performance.