Sleep is an essential component for good health and well-being. The National Sleep Foundation suggest that adults need around 7 to 9 hours sleep per night. Teenagers and active individuals (such as athletes) require a little bit more, around 8 to 10 hours.
Sportspeople go to great lengths to improve their performance, spending considerable time, effort, and money on several technical, physical, and psychological strategies. However, strategies aimed at improving something as basic as sleep are often overlooked.
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As a junior golf academy coach, I often scratched my head watching students practise hard throughout the day (some up to 6 hours), but then consistently chose to stay up late. All that effort and endeavour to improve, but the benefit of getting a good night's sleep was ignored.
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Sleep is arguably one of the most underrated performance factors in sport, and as such its importance is often neglected. A review of 37 sleep studies conducted by Gupta, Morgan, and Gilchrist (2017) found most athletes fall well short of the recommended daily amount and quality of sleep.
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The lack of adequate sleep could be due to a blasé attitude of its importance, but to be fair to athlete's......
Sport participation does come with its own problems.
Stages of Sleep
There are four stages of sleep that can be divided into REM (rapid eye movement) and the three stages of non-REM sleep.
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Stage 1 - This stage is considered the lightest as it’s fairly easy to be disrupted and awoken during this stage. As you close your eyes and prepare to drift off, your body will start to relax and your brain wave activity will slow. This stage normally doesn’t last very long (e.g. as little as 7 minutes) as you transition from being awake to sleep.
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Stage 2 - Your heart rate slows and your body temperature will drop slightly in preparation for the next stage - deep sleep. It is more difficult to be woken from this stage. Your brain waves continue to slow but there are spikes of activity known as sleep spindles and K complexes.
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Stage 3 - During this deep sleep stage, your brain activity reduces, breathing slows and muscles relax. The release of the human growth hormone during this phase is believed to play an important role in the revitalisation of the body as it repairs and rebuilds. It is believed to be the most restorative sleep stage, and it's difficult for a person to be awaken during this stage.
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REM Sleep - During this stage your eyes move in all directions and it is when dreaming typically occurs. Your brain activity is similar to when you are awake, your heart rate increases, but the body is inactive (in contrast to stage 3). This stage is believed to be important in the revitalisation of the mind.
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you may be required to be compete very early in the day (e.g. the first tee-off time in the British Open in 2019 was 06.35am local time) or very late in the day (e.g. in round 3 of the 2019 ATP Washington Open Andy Murray started a match just before midnight and it didn't finish until 3am local time), which will interrupt normal sleeping patterns.
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you can become fatigued from the intensity of training and competing, which can affect sleep.
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you are often required to travel away from home throughout the season. Travelling can be stressful and sleeping in foreign environments can be problematic.
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you may experience stress, excitement, and/or anxiety leading up to a competition, which can be a barrier to a good night's sleep.
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you may have to travel across different time zones, where the jet lag and adjustment to a different time zone is needed.
These challenges highlight the need for athletes to manage their sleep. Especially when you consider that sleep has been found to influence many important performance factors such as reaction time, accuracy, injury, illness etc.
It's what the expert do!
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Many sporting organisations have taken note of the importance of sleep, with some of the world's leading sport teams adding sleep experts to their coaching staff. Teams from British Cycling, the Premier League, NBA, and Super Rugby have employed sleep experts to improve the sleeping habits of their athletes.
Top athletes such as Roger Federer, Michelle Wie, and LeBron James are known to sleep around 12 hours per day (including daily naps). This is not just before a competition, but every day.
It has been suggested that sleep deprivation is one of the primary reasons for human error, and has even been associated with catastrophic events such as Chernobyl and the Challenger explosion. Thankfully in the world of sport, errors from sleep deprivation will not lead to such catastrophic events but it may be the difference between winning and losing. When athletes realise how important sleep is, I have little doubt they will pay more attention to it, and add sleep management to their training programme.