Abstract
A comprehensive monitoring of fitness, fatigue, and performance is crucial for understanding an athlete's individual responses to training to optimize the scheduling of training and recovery strategies. Resting and exercise-related heart rate measures have received growing interest in recent decades and are considered potentially useful within multivariate response monitoring, as they provide non-invasive and time-efficient insights into the status of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and aerobic fitness. In team sports, the practical implementation of athlete monitoring systems poses a particular challenge due to the complex and multidimensional structure of game demands and player and team performance, as well as logistic reasons, such as the typically large number of players and busy training and competition schedules. In this regard, exercise-related heart rate measures are likely the most applicable markers, as they can be routinely assessed during warm-ups using short (3–5 min) submaximal exercise protocols for an entire squad with common chest strap-based team monitoring devices. However, a comprehensive and meaningful monitoring of the training process requires the accurate separation of various types of responses, such as strain, recovery, and adaptation, which may all affect heart rate measures. Therefore, additional information on the training context (such as the training phase, training load, and intensity distribution) combined with multivariate analysis, which includes markers of (perceived) wellness and fatigue, should be considered when interpreting changes in heart rate indices. The aim of this article is to outline current limitations of heart rate monitoring, discuss methodological considerations of univariate and multivariate approaches, illustrate the influence of different analytical concepts on assessing meaningful changes in heart rate responses, and provide case examples for contextualizing heart rate measures using simple heuristics. To overcome current knowledge deficits and methodological inconsistencies, future investigations should systematically evaluate the validity and usefulness of the various approaches available to guide and improve the implementation of decision-support systems in (team) sports practice.
Highlights
Successful training and recovery management aims at optimizing adaptation and overall preparedness for enhanced competitive performance (Buchheit, 2014; Cardinale and Varley, 2017; Coutts et al, 2018; Kellmann et al, 2018)
We suggest that changes in heart rate (HR) measures should be interpreted primarily against the training context, rather than directly projected onto the constructs of fatigue or performance
When athlete monitoring is integrated into a decision-support system, numerous methodological considerations must be addressed throughout the decision-making process
Summary
Successful training and recovery management aims at optimizing adaptation and overall preparedness for enhanced competitive performance (Buchheit, 2014; Cardinale and Varley, 2017; Coutts et al, 2018; Kellmann et al, 2018). Remains speculative as to which amount the previously described associations between changes in training volume and intensity with changes in HR measures in endurance athletes are transferable to team sports, since the appropriate quantification of training load, volume, and intensity over the variety of training modalities and biological systems stressed in team sport practice is challenging (Buchheit, 2014; Bourdon et al, 2017) Despite these limitations, analyzing dose-response relationships is a central component of athlete management (Gabbett et al, 2017; McLaren et al, 2018), as it helps to assess injury risk (Gabbett, 2016; Bourdon et al, 2017) and may indirectly influence sports performance (i.e., success) through increased player availability (Thorpe et al, 2017). HRex should be interpreted as a fitness indicator rather than a marker of fatigue or performance
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