Athlete Recovery: Sleep

Performance Athletes & Sleep

• Obtain anything less than eight hours of sleep a night, and especially less than six hours a night, and the following happens:
• – Time to physical exhaustion drops by 10 to 30 percent
• – Aerobic output is significantly reduced.
• – Lowered vertical jump height,
• – Decreases in peak and sustained muscle strength.
• – Faster rates of lactic acid buildup.
• – Reductions in blood oxygen saturation.
• – Increases in blood carbon dioxide, due in part to a reduction in the amount of air that the lungs can expire.
• – Decreased ability of the body to cool itself during physical exertion through sweating – a critical part of peak performance – is impaired by sleep loss.

Post-performance sleep: 

• • – Accelerates physical recovery from common inflammation.
  • – Stimulates muscle repair.
  • – Restocks cellular energy in the form of glucose and glycogen
• – Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping.
• – The less you sleep, the shorter your life span.
• – Consequently, the more you sleep, the longer your lifespan.
• – Sleep is the most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day.
• – REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep exquisitely recalibrates and fine-tunes the emotional circuits of the human brain.  It’s also the type of sleep where most of your dreaming takes place.
  • – Did you know that during REM sleep your muscles become paralyzed so you don’t act out your dreams?
• – REM sleep helps your brain consolidate and process new information. This information is then retained in your long-term memory.
• – REM sleep helps to ensure better mental concentration and mood regulation.
• – Alcohol is one of the most powerful suppressors of REM sleep that we know of.
• – Any individual, no matter what age, will exhibit physical ailments, mental health instability, reduced alertness, and impaired memory if their sleep is chronically disrupted.
• – Sleep has proven itself time and again as a memory aid: both before learning, to prepare your brain for initially making new memories, and after learning, to cement those memories and prevent forgetting.
• – Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours.
• – Sleep deprivation vastly increases your likelihood of infection, and reduces your response to flu vaccine.
• – Poor and insufficient sleep is linked to lower testosterone levels….
  • – Limiting sleep to 5 hours a night for one week results in a tremendous drop in testosterone.  A lack of sleep blunts this crucial hormone so much that researchers estimate it ages a man by 5 to 10 years!