u/JuggernautOdd8786

It seems like a lot of performance monitoring in sport still works because coaches trust the metric enough to make a decision from it. Jump height, sprint times, wellness reports, HR, workload, and so on all have a place because someone knows what to do when the number changes.

What I’m trying to understand is where cognitive or physiological metrics would cross that same threshold. What would you need to see before a signal related to attention, fatigue, cognitive load, or perceptual strain became actionable enough to change drills, workload, or recovery?

Would reliability be the main issue, or is the bigger problem interpretation and knowing what intervention should follow?

I’ve been thinking about how these terms are used in practice, and it seems like people often mix them up too quickly.

Attention, cognitive workload, mental fatigue, and overload clearly overlap, but they also seem to refer to different things depending on the task, the measurement approach, and the time scale. If you were trying to define these in a way that is experimentally useful, how would you separate them?