How to use wellness questionnaires without them becoming paperwork
· Training Feel
A wellness questionnaire works for as long as the athlete reads it. The day they start tapping the same values out of habit, it keeps producing data but stops producing information — and the worst part is that from the outside it looks identical.
What is asked, and why those things
The usual set is four items: how they slept, how their muscles feel, how much fatigue they are carrying and how much stress. They cover what a sensor cannot see and what changes fastest from one day to the next.
Fewer is better. A twelve-question form is answered carefully in week one and on autopilot by week three. Four items in under a minute is what sustains consistency, and consistency is what makes the series worth anything.
When to ask
Before training, not after. Wellness describes the state the athlete arrives in, not what the session did to them — that is what perceived exertion covers. Asked at the end, both measures end up saying the same thing and half the information is lost.
The exact hour matters less than the regularity. Answering at the same point of the day makes an athlete’s values comparable with their own, which is the only comparison that holds.
The number alone is not enough
A wellness of 6 means nothing by itself. It means something when that athlete had been giving 8 and dropped to 6 three days running. The absolute value depends on how each person reads the scale; the change against their own history depends on it far less.
So the useful reading is not the squad average but the individual deviation. A group averaging 7 can contain two players in sustained decline, and the average hides them.
How to stop it becoming paperwork
Three things help. First, the athlete has to see something in return: answering for months with no feedback turns the questionnaire into an administrative chore.
Second, somebody has to react when the data asks for it. Asking a player once why they have been sleeping badly is worth more than any automatic reminder.
Third, never use it to police. The moment an athlete suspects a low answer costs them minutes, they stop answering honestly and the instrument breaks without anyone noticing.
In Training Feel the questionnaire is four questions the athlete answers from their phone, and the staff sees each one’s trend next to their load.
See how it works