By: Luis Garcia ATC/LAT,CSCS
Intro
Sleep is essential in our health and our well being as humans. Sleep has an impact on our physical development, emotional regulation, cognitive performance and our quality of life. While being a huge part of the recovery process evidence shows that sleep is associated with improved performance, injury reduction, and competitive success in athletes. There are things that are detrimental to an athletes sleep such as competition schedules, travel, stress, academic demands, and overtraining. Overall, athletes are poor at assessing their sleep quality, and usually lack proper amounts. Meaning if athletes put their sleep as a higher priority there would be improvements in performance and overall health.
WHAT DOES SLEEP HELP WITH?
• Reaction times • Motor function
• Motivation • Focus
• Stress regulation • Muscle recovery
• Sprint performance • Muscle glycogen
• Glucose metabolism • Memory and learning
• Injury risk • Illness rates
• Unwanted weight gain
This list honestly could go on forever. As more evidence comes out more athletes are starting to realize the importance of their sleep on athletic performance. Sleep plays an equally important role as nutrition and training does, which can be the edge between a win or a loss on game day.
Below I am going to breakdown and describe the "HEAVY HITTERS" of losing sleep, which include Injury, Reaction time, accuracy & speed, and decision making.
1. Injury
Reduced sleep has been linked to increased injury rates in athletes. A study concluded that injury rates in youth athletes increased by 65% during games that followed a night of sleep fewer than 6 hours. Another one looked at high school athletes found that sleep hours were the strongest predictor of injuries. Keeping your head up is good technique in many sports as you must be able to see whats in front of you to react and read your surroundings. an athlete who is lacking sleep will be slower to react and that could make the difference between preventing an injury, or being able to brace for an impact.
Fatigue increases your chances of illness, and decreases your immune systems ability to fight them off. When being in a team environment illnesses are easily spread. Being in these environments without proper sleep is a risk factor that athletes should be avoiding.
In reference to recovery, short sleep cycles (like naps) are not enough to give the body time to regenerate and repair cells. So not only can it cause injury it can keep them injured longer due to a slowed down recovery process. This can lead to more time spent on the sidelines during an athletes career. (ARTICLE BELOW)
2. REACTION TIME
Studies show that even a low level of fatigue can impair reaction time. Low levels of fatigue can impair reaction times as much or more than being legally drunk can. Sleep deprivation is actually extremely comparable to that of being drunk, which for athletes can cause trouble on the field.
Top level athletes need to react as quickly as possible without sparing even a fraction of a second. As it may seem like common sense for an athlete not to perform while under the influence of alcohol, why would it be alright to perform under the influence of lack of sleep? An all nighter can reduce your reaction time by more than 300%, and something like that can take a few days to recover back with sleep. If you cant expect to have peak reaction time after a few shots of tequila then you shouldn't expect to have very good reaction time on lack of sleep. A Harvard study shows that being awake for 22 hours has the same effect on your reaction time as to have just chugging 4 beers. (Article Below)
3. ACCURACY & SPEED
Sleep quality has been shown to impact the shooting accuracy and sprint time of basketball players. Improving sleep has been shown to increase performance in just about every sport that exists.
Stanford conducted a study with sleep and their mens basketball team. In this study they established a 4 week baseline with the athletes and their sleep schedules. Over the next 7 weeks they were put into a 7-week sleep extension period which they would get as much sleep as possible, 10hrs being the goal. What were the results?
They saw improvements in shooting accuracy, free throws increased by 9% and 3pt field goals increased by 9.2%. While also improving sprint speed by 5%. Improvements in these sites lets us know that sleep extension indicates that optimal sleep is essential in reaching peak athletic performance. (Article Below)
4. DECISION MAKING
In a major league baseball study it showed that players showed better judgment at the beginning of the season compared to the end. The cause? Mental fatigue from a long exhausting season.
Reduced sleep also reduces motivation, focus, memory, and learning. It causes trouble with memory and absorbing knowledge. Maclean's magazine had a spotlight showing that sleep impairs the brains frontal lobe and decision making abilities.
This causes an increase in risk taking behaviors. Further decreasing athletes athletic performances. With this being known being rested before an athletic event must be properly PLANNED. Set aside time to get the proper amount of sleep you need as an athlete. Just as you do for your nutrition or training. (ARTICLE BELOW)
HOW MUCH SLEEP IS ENOUGH?
Most people need around 7-9 hrs of sleep a night, if you're an athlete you're looking at a range of about 8-10 hrs of sleep for optimal performance. Sleep needs to be treated like calories. As an athlete when our activity levels go up so do our calories, sleep must be treated the same way.
Try to go to bed and get up at the same time everyday, when you travel give yourself time to adjust to jet lag and your schedule,reduce alcohol and caffeine. Doing these can help improve your sleep quality and duration.
CONCLUSION
You can not overstate the important of sleep and athletic performance. It can predict your reaction speed, accuracy, errors, injury, conditioning, focus....etc and it should be a part of any elite athletes preparation.
Now that you know the effects of sleep on performance you need to start taking steps in the right direction. Any athlete needing assistance with their sleep and recovery should highly recommend checking out our all natural "Rest and Recover" supplement in the "SHOP" section at the top of the page.