Wellness markers such as mood, motivation, fatigue, and stress can provide valuable insights into your overall health and performance. Monitoring these markers can help you optimise your lifestyle, manage your training load and provide you with warning signals when things are not quite right.
Our clinicians monitor wellness markers with professional athletes and military units to help improve their performance and health. This involves collecting a small but relevant set of evidence based health markers throughout the week and monitoring the movement of these markers over time. Both recent and long-term changes can provide valuable insights which our clinicians can use to guide an individual’s training and lifestyle.
Collecting these markers is a quick and simple process – it typically takes about 5-10 seconds to record a full set of markers on any given day. Each marker is captured on a scale of 1-10, often supported by some words which bring the numbers to life. The numbers allow our clinicians and technology to easily quantify and identify trends, optimal ranges and deviations outside of the norm.
We’re building our technology to mimic the role of our clinicians in professional sport. We want to make it easy for you to collect and track these markers so that we can provide you with science based guidance on how to use them to optimise your own training and lifestyle. The more you engage with your wellness markers, the more personalised and informed your guidance will be.
Here are some of the key benefits of collecting and tracking wellness markers:
1. Baseline, patterns and triggers identification: By tracking wellness markers over time, you can understand your baseline and identify patterns and triggers that may affect your performance and health. For example, identifying a recurring dip in mood or motivation levels on certain days or after specific activities can help you understand the impact of your lifestyle and steer you towards positive changes.
2. Workload and rest optimisation: Monitoring wellness markers can help you understand how well recovered you are from the stresses of day to day life and from your exercise sessions. This works particularly well in conjunction with monitoring your training load as it enables you to better understand the physical and mental effects of your exercise routine. These combined insights are highly actionable and will help you to optimise your training throughout the week and reduce your risk of injury and sickness. Don’t worry, we’ll help you action these insights. See our guide here on training load.
3. Stress management: Tracking stress levels can help you identify stressors and recognise when things are becoming too much. This recognition can be used as a trigger to implement coping strategies (eg mindfulness, meditation, or other relaxation techniques to manage stress and improve overall well-being). It can also be used as a steer to make changes to your lifestyle so that stress levels can be better controlled.
