Introduction
Sportspeople go to great lengths to improve their performance, spending considerable time, effort, and money on a number of technical, physical, and psychological strategies. However, strategies aimed at improving something as basic as sleep are often overlooked.
As a junior golf academy coach, I often scratched my head watching students practising hard throughout the day (some up to 6 hours), but then consistently chose to stay up late, e.g., 1am (with a wake up time of 7am). This meant only a maximum of 6 hours sleep when the recommended amount is 8-10 hours, meaning a sleep debt of up to 2 to 4+ hours!
All that effort and endeavour to improve, but the benefit of getting a good nights sleep was ignored. Top athletes such as Roger Federer, Michelle Wie, and LeBron James have not ignored the advice, and have stated they sleep around 12 hours per day (including daily naps). This desired amount of sleep is not just for the night before a competition, but every night.
Compare this behaviour.
Presumably, because they thought it wouldn't have any negative effect on their performance.
However, research looking at the impact of sleep on sporting performance has shown it can have an influence on a number of important performance factors, such as reaction-time, accuracy, memory, fatigue, and also influence the likelihood of illness or injury.
Athletes spend a lot of time training and competing, and consequently have to increase their nutrition to help fuel their body for performance and recovery. Sleep should be viewed in a similar way, it is needed for recovery, as the physical and mental nature of sport puts stress on the body.
If sleep is insufficient, the body does not get the time to revatilise the body and body, and effects the ability to process and commit information to memory.
Read about this in the relevant sections found on this page.
There is sufficient evidence that illustrates sleep debt can harm performance, whereas sleep extension importance of sleep on performance. As such, athletes and coaches should consider adding sleep management strategies to training programmes. This could include evaluating the timing of training sessions and how it may affect sleep. Where early morning starts are unavoidable, strategies to help sleep in the evening and/or daytime naps may be beneficial.
Sleep and take a nap. You will see in the factors that even a nap as little as 6 minutes has shown to produce benefits associated with performance.
sleep management strategies to your training programme. To help track and improve sleeping patterns, athletes can take advantage of modern technology currently available or through manual recording.
You need to be smart and add sleep management strategies to your training programme.
MODULE SLEEP
The impact of sleep on sport performance
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