Researching Stress and Recovery

I am currently in Germany working at Ruhr University Bochum and writing my Phd dissertation around the topics of stress and recovery in sport. Since I'm gaining some more expertise in this field, I thought I'd try  to blog a bit about the topics. The focus of this first post will be an introduction to what I'm doing on a daily basis. 

"Stress and recovery" as a topic is very VERY broad and both concepts are very complex- so there is no way I could come even close to covering everything. My focus is on measuring and monitoring recovery and stress states in athletes. Naturally, I place greater emphasis on psychological markers of stress and recovery. One of the easiest ways of doing this is by using self-report questionnaires. I'm in the process of validating two such questionnaires, and I'll be sure to post a link when I finally get something published. In short, my days are spent either writing, reading/researching + taking notes, analysing data and looking for participants. 

In the next post, I'll go over the importance of monitoring the recovery stress state.