Athlete Fatigue & Burnout
One of the challenges of successful multisport athletes – especially in an area such as PEI where athletes may participate competitively in more than one or two sports – is fatigue.
Sport PEI supports the importance of multisport participation in developing athletes, but it is also important to monitor training load to ensure the athletes are healthy and able to compete to their best ability.
While both athlete fatigue and burnout involve exhaustion, fatigue refers to a temporary physical tiredness often resulting from intense training and physical and mental load over a period of weeks. Burnout is a more chronic state of mental and emotional exhaustion, usually stemming from prolonged stress and often accompanied by a decreased passion for the sport, leading to a devaluation of the activity and a reduced sense of accomplishment. Essentially, burnout is a deeper, more psychological state compared to simple fatigue.
It must also be remembered that developing athletes have other things competing for their attention and energy – including school, hobbies, family, and also even physical growth. Nutrition and recovery play an important part in the athlete being able to tolerate training and competition, while performing well. As adults, parents and coaches must be aware of how much they are asking young athletes to do and measure and understand when they need rest or a break.
Fatigue is described as a decline of the overall physical or specific cardiorespiratory, neuromuscular, physiological, or cognitive function of performing a particular task over time due to acute or chronic exercise and/or mental load.
Often fatigue decreases the ability of athletes to sense the positions of their upper and lower limb joints (proprioception). Fatigue decrease the forces muscles can generate to run, jump, throw, or respond to forces applied to the body. As the athletes’ ability to control their limbs decreases, the rate of potential injury increases. Consistent fatigue and overuse without recovery will also lead to microtears in tendons and muscles resulting in overuse injuries.
There are multiple ways to measure fatigue. For more serious elite competitive athletes, there are many blood biomarkers that can be measured including urea, IGF-1, adenosine, lactate, glutamine, cortisol, etc. These are measured by blood tests, however, there are some simple ways for parents to predict their child may be doing too much.
The first clue is consistent challenges getting out of bed in the morning and feeling tired. The athlete may become more irritable than normal. Another is increases in resting heart rate and heart rate variability (which can be easily measured with today’s smart watches). Finally, there are perceived exertion questionnaires that teams and athletes can complete to give an indication of fatigue.
Some examples of these questionnaires:
- Profile of Mood State (POMS) – https://www.brianmac.co.uk/poms.htm#google_vignette
- Daily Analysis of Life Demands for Athletes (DALDA)
- Simple questionnaire for home use – https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376451442_The_simple_low-cost_guide_to_athlete_fatigue_monitoring
- Athlete Burnout – https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Athlete-Burnout-Questionnaire-administered-to-athletes-Items-1-and-14-are-reverse_fig1_364211127
There are a few online questionnaires that can be used but they often have a small fee. Professional and national team will use some form of the questionnaire daily to understand the level of fatigue of their athletes, and will adjust training load accordingly. As well, most professional teams use GPS devices to monitor player movement during practices and games to measure their speed, jump height, etc., to monitor real time fatigue.
When athletes end up enduring heavy training loads, stress, mental performance loads including school, etc., over a prolonged period of time they end up in a situation that results in “burnout”. This can happen when different sport seasons overlap and the athlete trains and competes in two or three sports simultaneously. It is imperative that parents and coaches monitor what we are asking our athletes to do physically throughout a week.
It may need to be examined further if the athlete has experienced multiple injuries in the same training year, especially if they are overuse injuries. Burnout leads to decrease enjoyment from sport, detachment, and often young athletes will actually quit the sport. It is worth a discussion between the athlete, parents , coaches, and medical professional if these signs start to appear. Often as an athlete begins to excel and train at the provincial /national level they may have to prioritize one sport to concentrate on and do their other sports at a more recreational level.
If the amount or load from training and competing in sport is monitored and the athlete’s recovery from training, fatigue, injuries, and ensure can be limited for athletes to enjoy pursuing their dreams.
Randy Goodman
AHP Program Director
References
Monitoring Training Load to Understand Fatigue in Athletes Shona L Halson
Sports Med. 2014 Sep 9;44(Suppl 2):139–147. doi: 10.1007/s40279-014-0253-z
Assessment of Fatigue and Recovery in Sport: Narrative Review
Thomas Bestwick-Stevenson 1 2, Rebecca Toone 3, Emma Neupert 4, Kimberley Edwards 1 2, Stefan Kluzek 1 2
. 2022 Dec;43(14):1151-1162. doi: 10.1055/a-1834-7177. Epub 2022 Apr 25.
Overuse Injuries, Overtraining, and Burnout in Young Athletes
Joel S. Brenner, MD, MPH, FAAP; Andrew Watson, MD, MS, FAAP; American Academy of Paediatrics, Jan 2024.