Exercise and Sports Metabolomics: Analytical Platforms, Metabolite Annotation, Pathway-Level Interpretation, and Biomarker-Panel Readiness

Exercise and sports metabolomics provide a systems-level approach to characterizing how acute exercise, training adaptation, nutrition, recovery, and environmental stress reshape human metabolism. By profiling metabolites related to substrate utilization, mitochondrial function, redox balance, inflammation, muscle stress, and recovery kinetics, these approaches can reveal pathway-level responses that conventional single biomarkers cannot capture. However, many exercise-responsive features remain difficult to interpret because of incomplete chemical identification, uncertain annotation confidence, limited quantitative reproducibility, variable pre-analytical control, inconsistent data processing, and insufficient biological validation. This narrative review examines recent advances in exercise and sports metabolomics, with emphasis on LC–MS, GC–MS, NMR spectroscopy, IMS–MS, and CE–MS workflows; platform selection; metabolite annotation and identification; pathway-level interpretation; and evidence requirements for candidate-panel development. Exercise-responsive metabolites should be interpreted as context-dependent pathway signals rather than isolated indicators of fatigue, recovery, adaptation, or performance. The review consolidates requirements for sampling, quality control, metadata capture, repeated-measures analysis, and external validation within an evidence-readiness roadmap. Wearable biochemical monitoring, AI-assisted analysis, and multi-omics integration may support future applications, but their value depends on analytical robustness, external validation, and physiological interpretability. Exercise and sports metabolomics should therefore progress from descriptive feature discovery toward reproducible, quantitatively reliable, and biologically validated pathway-level interpretation.