Understanding the Fatigue-Recovery Cycle in Team Sport Athletes

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Identifying and understanding the fatigue response of athletes following intensive training and competition is necessary to avoid injury, performance decrements and overtraining. There is an abundance of tests and monitoring tools that have been used to describe the fatigue response of both individualand team-sport athletes. These tests typically include measures of neuromuscular function, subjective questionnaires, blood and salivary markers, or physical performance tests. Importantly though, the tests employed must be valid, reliable and practically convenient in applied settings. Investigators have commonly assessed fatigue measures during tournament competition [1-3] or over subsequent days following competitive matches [4-6] in an attempt to identify the time course of the fatigue-recovery cycle. This provides an understanding of how an athlete recovers from competition and guides training loads and recovery practices when athletes may be most vulnerable to nonfunctional overreaching and injury.