Behavioral and psychophysiological monitoring in elite beach volleyball: performance consistency under environmental stress

Abstract

Beach volleyball is an outdoor Olympic team sport in which heat, humidity, wind, sand, and tournament density can interact with psychological and physiological strain. This systematic literature review synthesized evidence on monitoring athlete state and performance consistency, with particular attention to psychometric, physiological/biometric, neuromuscular-load, environmental, and computational modalities. The review followed PRISMA 2020 and used a structured Scopus search of TITLE-ABS-KEY fields, identifying 144 records. Forty-eight full texts were assessed and 10 studies were retained for the core qualitative synthesis; 50 additional sources were used only for contextual comparison and were not treated as included evidence. Eligibility required beach-volleyball athlete or athlete-performance data, direct relevance to state monitoring or performance, and sufficient empirical information for extraction. Because the included studies differed substantially in design, population, exposure, timing, and outcomes, quantitative pooling was not considered methodologically appropriate and a thematic synthesis was conducted instead. The evidence indicates that session-RPE, heart-rate variability, perceived well-being, neuromuscular measures, salivary hormones, mental-fatigue measures, sleep-related indicators, and computational performance models can each capture meaningful components of athlete state, but they are usually studied in isolation. The central gap is the absence of prospectively validated systems that combine psychological, physiological, load, environmental, and computational streams to predict stable performance across tournament days. The review therefore supports a multimodal monitoring agenda while emphasizing that the proposed phenotyping framework remains a research model rather than a validated predictive system.