Mental Fatigue Over 2 Elite Netball Seasons: A Case for Mental Fatigue to be Included in Athlete Self-Report Measures.

Purpose: Mental fatigue is emerging as an important consideration for elite sporting performance, yet it is rarely monitored. The present study assessed changes in mental fatigue in professional team-sport athletes across 2 seasons and examined the relationship between mental fatigue and other athlete self-report measures of well-being.

Methods: Elite netballers contracted to all teams competing in Australia's premier professional netball competition during the 2018 and 2019 seasons (N = 154) participated.

How do elite female team sport athletes experience mental fatigue? Comparison between international competition, training and preparation camps.

Mental fatigue has been shown to negatively influence physical, technical and tactical aspects of sporting performance. However, mental fatigue is not routinely monitored or managed in elite sport and it is not clear whether mental fatigue occurs and/or changes across the varied contextual demands experienced by elite athletes in training, preparation and competition. This study explored self-report measures of mental fatigue across eight training camps and six competition periods (two benchmark tournaments and four international test series) with international netballers ( = 22, 25.

Night Games and Sleep: Physiological, Neuroendocrine, and Psychometric Mechanisms.

Context: Night games are a regular occurrence for team-sport athletes, yet sleep complaints following night competitions are common. The mechanisms responsible for reported sleep difficulty in athletes are not understood.

Methods: An observational crossover design investigating a night netball game and a time-matched rest day in 12 netball athletes was conducted to ascertain differences in physiological (core temperature), psychometric (state and trait), and neuroendocrine (adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol) responses.

Sleep, sport, and the brain.

The recognition that sleep is one of the foundations of athlete performance is increasing both in the elite athlete arena as well as applied performance research. Sleep, as identified through sleep deprivation and sleep extension investigations, has a role in performance, illness, injury, metabolism, cognition, memory, learning, and mood. Elite athletes have been identified as having poorer quality and quantity of sleep in comparison to the general population.

Software thresholds alter the bias of actigraphy for monitoring sleep in team-sport athletes.

Objectives: Actical actigraphy is commonly used to monitor athlete sleep. The proprietary software, called Actiware, processes data with three different sleep-wake thresholds (Low, Medium or High), but there is no standardisation regarding their use. The purpose of this study was to examine validity and bias of the sleep-wake thresholds for processing Actical sleep data in team sport athletes.

Longer Sleep Durations Are Positively Associated With Finishing Place During a National Multiday Netball Competition.

Juliff, LE, Halson, SL, Hebert, JJ, Forsyth, PL, and Peiffer, JJ. Longer sleep durations are positively associated with finishing place during a national multiday netball competition. J Strength Cond Res 32(1): 189-194, 2018-Sleep is often regarded as the single best recovery strategy available to an athlete, yet little is known about the quality and quantity of sleep in athletes during multiday competitions.

Understanding sleep disturbance in athletes prior to important competitions.

Objectives: Anecdotally many athletes report worse sleep in the nights prior to important competitions. Despite sleep being acknowledged as an important factor for optimal athletic performance and overall health, little is understood about athlete sleep around competition. The aims of this study were to identify sleep complaints of athletes prior to competitions and determine whether complaints were confined to competition periods.

Influence of contrast shower and water immersion on recovery in elite netballers.

Contrast water therapy is a popular recovery modality in sport; however, appropriate facilities can often be difficult to access. Therefore, the present study examined the use of contrast showers as an alternative to contrast water therapy for team sport recovery. In a randomized, crossover design, 10 elite female netball athletes (mean ± SD: age, 20 ± 0.