During recent years sport has become more strenuous with increasing athletic demands from com-petition schedules and increased training. This trend makes the balance between training and recov-ery difficult, exposing the athlete to increased injury risk and underperformance. Regular athlete monitoring can be a key tool to help practitioners to quantify training looking at training response and the impact of possible underperformance allowing practitioners to modify and individualise training accordingly.
This thesis consists of three main chapters which include, a general introduction (Chapter 1), a lit-erature review around the topic of athlete monitoring (Chapter 2), and a 1-year longitudinal exper-imental research study (Chapter 3).
Chapter 1 gives an introduction and rationale for monitoring athletes, indeed with the increased demands from sport and the physical evolution athletes it has become very important to find tools to monitor athlete training load response, and the recovery/work ratio attributed to every player, the second part of the chapter presents the current trends related to athlete monitoring.
The Chapter 2 describes and examines some of the tools adopted in current athlete monitoring practice including the main subjective and objective monitoring tests commonly used.
Chapter 3 presents a 1-year longitudinal research study examining the within-participant relation-ship between training load and athlete monitoring markers within a cohort of rugby union players.