How does sleep affect sports performance? You’ve heard it over and over again, to have better health you need to stay active. Not only will you be healthier but you will feel, look and perform better. It’s also said that you’ll actually have a much more positive outlook on life. But what you may not always be told is that the better quality of sleep you get each night is also critical to feeling all of these things. Studies show that 150 minutes of moderate vigorous activity per week can improve sleep quality by 65% and the recommended amount of sleep for athletes who are training for a competition is 10 hours daily. As an athlete, you might be wondering, does sleep affect your sports performance or does your sports performance affect your sleep? One could reason that the more active you are the better you will sleep but that could be confused with thoughts that you exercised so much you just wear yourself out. During exercise and sport participation our bodies are depleted of not only energy but of fluids and our muscles start to break down. During sleep our bodies begin the mending process of rebuilding muscle, cells and replenishing our body of important fluids. If we do not give our bodies the time to rest and rejuvenate then we are more prone to injury, distraction and impaired response time. Other sleep deprived issues often include:
increased stress hormone
increased cortisol
decreased production of glycogen & carbohydrates (stored for energy use during physical activity)
obesity & weight gain
heart disease
diabetes
colds and flus
depression
decreased energy/increased fatigue
Getting a good night’s sleep and how it affects top athletes is so important even Parade magazine is writing articles about New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s sleep habits. When asked why a good night’s sleep was so important to Brady, he responded: “Well it’s got to be a priority. I think sleep is so important because I break my body down so much with my sport. It’s the only place to get the recovery that I need. After the kids go to bed I’m right behind them and, whenever they wake up, is usually when I wake up. I’m hopefully asleep by 9 o’clock. During the season, I’d say even earlier, usually 8:30 p.m., and I’m up at 5 or 5:30 on most mornings. I’m usually early to bed early to rise.” Devices have been designed to track our every movement and how many steps we take throughout the day with alerts that help remind us that we need to reach 10,000 steps (the average walker gets 5,000 steps daily) during the day to stay healthy of heart and mind. Now these devices include sleep monitoring. Some tech tools such as Fatigue Science focus on sleep tracking, built for elite sports teams (professional, collegiate & Olympic). Combining 25 years of US Army studies that developed biomathematical fatigue modeling that monitors how we sleep and supplies the data to actively predict human fatigue. The combined technologies supplied by the Fatigue Science model tracks different sleep scenarios: circadian rhythm, time of day, sleep quantity, sleep & wake consistency, cumulative sleep debt and wake episodes. Knowing how we sleep is just as important as how many hours we sleep. RestoreZ products are designed and crafted specifically to enhance sleep performance. Deep Asleep is a nutritional formula to support deeper, more restful and regenerative sleep. Stay Asleep’s formula was created to gravitate your sleep towards empowering your circadian rhythm to get you back to a healthy, restorative rest.