Wellbeing and recovery of your players made simple: questionnaire, sleep and warning signs

A five-question, one-minute-a-day questionnaire to spot overload, poor sleep and stress in youth and amateur football. What the evidence says, how to use it with children and teenagers, how much they should sleep, what to do when an alarm goes off (and how far a coach can go) and how to combine it with perceived exertion.

Linkalde · 2026-10-31

On a Tuesday a 14-year-old player arrives at training with a dull look in his eyes. He has slept little for three nights because of exams, played ninety minutes on Saturday and had a long family lunch on Sunday. On paper, the week’s load is the usual one. But that boy is not the same as two weeks ago, and if you don’t see it, you ask of him the same as of everyone else.

In youth and amateur football almost nobody has heart rate monitors, GPS or blood tests. You have something cheaper and, according to the available evidence, just as useful: asking. This article proposes a one-minute routine per player, with five questions, and explains what to look for, what to do with the answers and, above all, how far your role as a coach goes.

Why monitoring wellbeing is worthwhile

Players in youth categories do not only accumulate football load. They add classes, homework, exams, travel, other sports and, in adolescence, changes in sleep, mood and body. An imbalance between load and recovery can do harm: the clinical report of the American Academy of Pediatrics on overuse injuries, overtraining and burnout in young athletes says so explicitly (Brenner and Watson, 2024).

Monitoring wellbeing helps you with four very concrete things:

• Spotting in time the player who is short of recovery, before an overuse injury appears.
• Noticing an illness that is starting (unusual tiredness, poor sleep) so that he does not train on top of a cold or flu.
• Seeing changes in mood or stress that have nothing to do with football but that affect how he plays and learns.
• Adjusting the day’s session with team data instead of by intuition, without giving up your coach’s eye.

What the evidence says: asking works

The systematic review by Saw, Main and Gastin (2016) compared subjective measures (what the athlete reports about mood, stress or fatigue) with objective measures (blood markers, resting heart rate or heart rate during exercise). It gathered 56 studies and concluded that the two families of measures almost never correlate with each other, and that the subjective ones reflected changes in acute and chronic load with more sensitivity and consistency than the objective ones. Wellbeing worsened when load rose suddenly or stayed high, and improved when it dropped.

This fits with a study in elite Australian football (Gastin, Meyer and Robinson, 2013), where the players’ wellbeing ratings followed the rhythm of the weekly training cycle and rose in the week without a match. Its authors consider them a practical tool for coaches. The idea of monitoring overtraining with simple ratings comes from work such as Hooper and Mackinnon (1995), and many of the brief questionnaires used today descend from it.

An honest caveat: the title of the review says that subjective measures «outperform» objective ones, but what the data show is that they are more sensitive for tracking load, not that they are better at everything. The authors themselves defend using them alone or within a mixed approach. For a team with no resources, the message is clear: start by asking.

Important caveat: almost all these studies were carried out with adults, elite or semi-elite athletes. There is far less research with children and teenagers, so we extrapolate with caution. What follows is our own judgement, backed by that evidence, not a protocol validated for youth football.

The five-question questionnaire

Five questions are enough: sleep, energy, body (muscle soreness), stress and mood. Each is answered from 1 to 5. So that it can be added up without thinking, always use the same direction: 5 is the best and 1 the worst. (Many published questionnaires use a 1 to 7 scale and sometimes the other way round; what matters is that it is always the same in your team.)

The sum gives a number between 5 and 25. You don’t need to give the total too much importance. What really provides information is the comparison of each player with himself: his average of the last weeks and today’s drop. A 15 can be a normal day for one and a signal for another.

How to read the answers

• A player scores 1 or 2 on any question: talk to him that day, even if only in two sentences.
• A player drops several points at once compared with his usual average: adjust his session and ask him again tomorrow.
• A player has had the same question low for several days in a row (sleep, mood): it is not an anecdote, it is a pattern. It calls for a longer conversation and, where appropriate, letting the family know.
• Half the team drops at the same time after an exam week or a tournament: the signal belongs to the group and is solved by lowering the session load, not by singling anyone out.

How to apply it with children and teenagers

The questionnaire is the same, but how you run it changes with age. These guidelines are our own judgement, designed so that the tool does not become a source of problems.

• Up to 9 or 10 years old, forget numbers. Use smiley faces (happy, normal, tired) or traffic-light colours, and limit the questionnaire to two or three questions. With them, looking and asking works better than making them fill anything in. For perceived exertion there are scales with drawings validated in children (Roemmich and colleagues, 2006), a good model if you want faces instead of numbers.
• From 11 or 12 years old onwards, the 1 to 5 scale works well. Run it in 30 seconds, in the changing room, before going out, on paper or on the phone.
• Keep it private. Each player answers without teammates seeing the answer. If you do it aloud, the boy who says «a 1» in front of everyone will learn to say «a 5» next time.
• Never punish or reward the answers. An «I feel terrible» cannot cost him playing time, nor an «I feel perfect» earn him a prize. If a player learns that telling the truth hurts him, he will stop telling it and you will have lost the tool.
• Explain what it is for. One sentence is enough: «This helps me adjust training and look after you, it is not a grade».
• Say what you do with it. If you ask and nothing ever happens, they will stop answering seriously. An «I saw you slept little, today you will have less load» builds trust.

Honesty is the most serious limit of any questionnaire. Teenagers may answer what they think the coach wants to hear, especially if they are competing for a place. There is no foolproof recipe: what helps most is a climate in which saying you are tired has no cost, and that you check the answers against what you see on the pitch.

Sleep, the great forgotten factor

If you had to choose just one of the five questions, it would be the one on sleep. The consensus of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (Paruthi and colleagues, 2016) recommends these hours per 24 hours:

The same consensus notes that habitually sleeping less than recommended is associated with problems of attention, behaviour and learning, and with a higher risk of accidents and injuries. In teenagers, also with more risk of depression, self-harm and suicidal thoughts. The correspondence with youth football categories is ours, based on the usual ages of each category.

Sleep and injuries in teenagers

The first studies with secondary-school athletes, such as that of Milewski and colleagues (2014), already pointed to more injuries in those who slept less. That line of work is summarised in a systematic review with meta-analysis (Gao and colleagues, 2019): of seven studies, five associated chronic lack of sleep with more sports or musculoskeletal injuries, and the pooled result of three of them pointed in the same direction (odds ratio of 1.58, with a 95 % confidence interval of 1.05 to 2.37). The authors note that those who habitually sleep fewer than 8 hours or wake up often could be at higher risk.

Don’t get carried away. There are few studies, all with sleep reported by the young people themselves, very different definitions of «sleeping badly» and of «injury», and on lack of sleep on a single night the evidence is insufficient. It is an association, not proof that sleeping more prevents injuries. Even so, it is consistent with everything else and it costs nothing to bear in mind.

What you can do: talk about sleep with players and families, avoid late call-ups and late training sessions on weekdays when possible, and not make things worse with group messages at eleven at night. The expert consensus on sleep in athletes (Walsh and colleagues, 2021) proposes sleep education and screening as basic tools and reminds us that needs vary from person to person.

Food, drink, school and growth spurt

Only the essentials here, because the platform has specific articles on eating and drinking in youth football and on growth and maturation.

• Hydration: the American Academy of Pediatrics reminds us that young people regulate heat well as long as they stay properly hydrated, and that poor hydration, excess exertion and insufficient recovery are risk factors for heat stroke, which is mostly preventable (AAP, 2011). Have them drink before, during and after, and reduce the load on hot days.
• Food: don’t get into diets. If you see a player who stops eating, loses weight or always arrives without energy, it is a matter for his family and his paediatrician, not for you.
• School: exam weeks are weeks of more stress and less sleep. It is the best time to lower the intensity a little and raise the game component. This is our own judgement; no study quantifies it.
• Growth spurt: rapid growth is associated with a higher injury risk in young athletes (Johnson and colleagues, 2023, who set it out as the starting point of their study). If a player grows a lot all at once and complains often, watch the load and let the family know.

What to do when an alarm goes off

This is the important part. You are not a doctor or a psychologist, and the questionnaire diagnoses nothing. Its value is that it tells you who to talk to. A proposed ladder, from least to most (our own judgement):

1. Talk alone, calmly and without an audience: «I’ve seen you tired this week, how is everything?». Listen more than you talk.
2. Adapt the load that day: less intensity, fewer minutes, a different role or a recovery session. He must not feel set aside as a punishment.
3. If the pattern repeats over several days, talk to the family and suggest going to the doctor or the paediatrician.
4. If the problem is physical (persistent pain, fever, tiredness that does not go away), refer to the club doctor or the paediatrician. Do not train with undiagnosed pain.
5. If there are signs related to mental health or safeguarding, follow your club’s or federation’s child protection protocol and inform the person in charge. Do not investigate on your own.

Warning signs that are not «normal tiredness» (our own judgement, not a clinical list): prolonged sadness or irritability, withdrawal from the group, loss of interest in playing, remarks about being worthless or not wanting to go on, clear changes in eating or weight, visible self-harm, unexplained bruises or fear of going home. The IOC consensus on mental health (Reardon and colleagues, 2019) states that mental symptoms and disorders are common among elite athletes and that their diagnosis and treatment are a matter for professionals. If a player talks about hurting himself or not wanting to live, do not leave him alone: tell his family and, if there is immediate risk, call 112. The 024 line deals with suicidal behaviour in Spain.

Combining it with load (perceived exertion)

The questionnaire tells you how the player is. What is missing is how much has been asked of him. In the article on preseason without injuries and with controlled load (pretemporada-sin-lesiones-y-con-carga-controlada) we explain the method of perceived exertion times minutes: at the end, each player rates how hard the session was from 0 to 10 and you multiply by the minutes. The method was proposed by Foster and colleagues (2001), who compared it with heart rate in cycling and basketball and considered it valid for many types of exercise.

The combination is simple. Before training, the wellbeing questionnaire. At the end, the session load. If the load rises and wellbeing falls at the same time, you have the clearest signal. If wellbeing falls without the load having risen, look outside the pitch: school, sleep, illness or mood. And if the load drops and wellbeing stays low, the problem is probably not about training. It is a practical reading, not a validated rule.

The Linkalde load and wellbeing template gathers both in a spreadsheet: one row per player and day, with the five questions and the perceived exertion of the session. You only write down the numbers.

On perceived exertion: the original study by Foster and colleagues worked with adults. In young children the 0 to 10 scale is harder to understand, and for that there are scales with drawings (Roemmich and colleagues, 2006, who validated two for submaximal exercise; they are not interchangeable, so choose one and stick with it).

A typical week, made simple

Three or four days a week are also fine. What matters is that it is consistent and that the player always compares under the same conditions, for example always before training. If you have to choose between a long weekly questionnaire and a short almost daily one, choose the short one.

Limits: what this system cannot do

• Fatigue is ambiguous. «I’m tired» can be training load, poor sleep, an exam, a virus or a bad day. The questionnaire warns you that something is going on, but does not tell you the cause. That is what the conversation is for.
• There is little research on children and teenagers in youth football, and the available studies are small or with adult athletes. The thresholds («a 2 is an alarm») are practical guidelines, not validated values.
• If players do not answer honestly or stop answering, the data is useless. Consistency weighs more than perfection.
• With small teams, a single isolated data point means nothing. You interpret the trend, not the single day.
• It does not replace the doctor, the psychologist or your own judgement. It is a complement to what you see on the pitch.

Checklist

• I have chosen five questions (sleep, energy, body, stress and mood) and a single 1 to 5 scale, with 5 always as the best.
• I have adapted the format to the age: smiley faces or traffic light for the little ones, numerical scale from 11 or 12 years old.
• Players answer in private, and I have explained what it is for.
• I never punish or reward an answer.
• I compare each player with his own average, not with the rest of the team.
• I also note the perceived exertion at the end of the session.
• I am clear on the ladder: talk, adapt the load, tell the family, refer to the doctor and, if there are signs related to mental health or safeguarding, follow the club protocol.
• I know I am not a health professional and I do not diagnose.
• Once a week I spend five minutes reviewing the sheet.

This routine costs one minute a day and needs no equipment. What changes is the relationship with your players: really asking, listening and adjusting when needed is part of coaching, and it is what makes a 14-year-old who arrives with a dull look in his eyes find an adult who notices.