Allostasis, Health, Exercise and Sport within the Framework of Network Physiology

Network Physiology investigates how physiological systems dynamically coordinate across multiple scales to sustain health, adapt to stressors, and respond to environmental demands. Central to this framework is the concept of allostasis, understood not simply as stability through change, but rather as the ability of systems to reorganize flexibly while maintaining coherence through dynamic interactions across networks. This more integrative and expansive interpretation encompasses, but is not confined to, theoretical and modeling paradigms such as variational and relational stability and anticipatory synchronization.

Exercise and sport provide unique contexts in which allostatic mechanisms are continuously tested. Acute and chronic physical activity require the integration of cardiovascular, respiratory, neuromuscular, immune, endocrine, and cognitive networks. Fluctuating energy demands, stress responses, recovery cycles, and psychosocial influences shape these interconnections. Such processes expose the dual nature of adaptation: fostering resilience and improved performance on one hand, but also leading to maladaptation, overtraining, chronic fatigue, or injury on the other.
Placing health and disease under the lens of network physiology and allostasis as the ability of systems to reorganize flexibly while maintaining the overall stability as modeled by variational free energy principles or strong anticipation mechanisms, offers a powerful translational framework.
It can illuminate how individuals adapt—or fail to adapt—to recurrent stress exposure, whether in elite sport, everyday exercise, or clinical rehabilitation. Moreover, computational modeling, multimodal sensing, and complexity science offer new approaches to quantify allostatic load, resilience, and recovery, thereby bridging theoretical insights with practical applications in health and performance.

This Research Topic seeks to gather interdisciplinary contributions that integrate network physiology and allostasis with exercise, sport, and health sciences. The aim is to advance mechanistic understanding of adaptive and maladaptive processes, develop computational tools to capture the ability of systems to reorganize flexibly and propose innovative monitoring, intervention, and rehabilitation strategies.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: synchronization, allostasis, network physiology, variational stability, relational stability, exercise, sport, resilience, adaptation, recovery, fatigue, multimodal monitoring, health

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.