Wellness and sRPE: how to read them together
Before training, the player says how they feel. After training, they say how hard it was. Those two signals — wellness and sRPE — tell different stories, and reading them together says more than either one on its own.
What daily wellness is
Wellness is a short questionnaire the player completes before training: numeric or single-choice questions about sleep, muscle soreness, stress, mood, or whatever each coaching staff decides to ask, with visual thresholds the staff configures. It is not a medical exam — it is a quick, subjective snapshot of how the player arrives that day.
What RPE is, and how it becomes sRPE
RPE (rating of perceived exertion) is a number the player reports after a session, typically on a 0–10 scale, to describe how hard that session felt. Foster et al. (2001) proposed a simple way to turn that perception into a load figure: multiply RPE by the session’s duration in minutes. The result, session-RPE (sRPE), is a number in arbitrary units that works as a practical estimate of a session’s internal load, without needing a heart-rate monitor or a complex formula. A 60-minute session rated 6/10 and a 40-minute session rated 9/10 land close to the same sRPE, even though they felt different on the pitch — which is the point: the figure captures total internal load, not intensity alone.
Why they read better together
Wellness measures the state a player brings into a session. sRPE measures how much that particular session cost them. Neither one, alone, tells the full story: a high sRPE after a demanding session can be exactly what you would expect if wellness had been fine; that same high sRPE after several days of low wellness is a different combination, and probably worth a closer look. Reading them together — wellness before, sRPE after, both against the player’s recent history — is what gives each number its context. Two players can log the same sRPE for the same drill and still need a different conversation: one arrived with good sleep and low soreness, the other had already flagged three low-wellness mornings in a row.
What the visual alerts mean, and what they do not mean
Athlo provides daily tracking, history and visual alerts that help spot responses that need attention. “Need attention” is the right phrase: an alert is a prompt for someone on the coaching or medical staff to take a closer look, not a clinical conclusion or a diagnosis. That matches the evidence: Saw, Main and Gastin (2016), in a systematic review, found that subjective self-reported measures — like wellness and RPE — are at least as sensitive as the objective measures commonly used to reflect a player’s response to training. They are useful precisely because they are an early signal, not because they replace professional judgement.
Who fills in what
The player completes their own wellness and their own RPE feedback from their phone; staff can enter or correct those records according to their role’s permissions. The daily checklist, by contrast, is filled in by staff from an editable grid: it is not something the player sees or completes. And when the whole squad’s responses need entering at once — after a match, for example — staff can do that in bulk.
When there is no phone to hand
Players do not always have their own phone to hand before training, especially in academy age groups or during pre-season. For those cases, wellness or feedback can also be completed from a shared changing-room tablet, limited to the selected day or session so it does not stay open beyond that. The player still answers for themselves; the shared tablet only changes the screen they use, not who fills it in.
In practice
Neither signal replaces the judgement of the coaching or medical staff: they are data to review, not decisions already made. On the load dashboard, staff can check wellness and availability alongside the GPS’s physical indicators, on the same screen, without cross-referencing separate spreadsheets. Seeing them together, day by day, is what makes them useful.
Sources
- Foster C, Florhaug JA, Franklin J, Gottschall L, Hrovatin LA, Parker S, Doleshal P, Dodge C (2001) “A new approach to monitoring exercise training” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 15:109–115.
- Saw AE, Main LC, Gastin PB (2016) “Monitoring the athlete training response: subjective self-reported measures trump commonly used objective measures: a systematic review” British Journal of Sports Medicine 50:281–291.