How can I sleep better before my next sportive?
How to prevent jittery nerves the night before affecting your performance
After months of dedicated training, there is nothing worse than a night of broken sleep before your big sportive. Anxiety, everyday stress or a poor sleep set up in your bedroom can leave you struggling to drift off so you wake up feeling exhausted. “Bad sleep can affect performance, energy, mental focus and concentration, whereas quality sleep can bring more consistent performances, faster recovery times, higher motivation levels and better decision making,” explains sleep coach Nick Littlehales
(sportsleepcoach.com). “But the first time many athletes think about it is when their head hits the pillow.”
Littlehales, who has helped elite athletes such as footballer Cristiano Ronaldo and cyclist Bradley Wiggins to improve their sleep quality, stresses the importance of developing a relaxing presleep routine to calm your mind – not just the night before a race, but every night: “You need to make your pre-bed routine exactly that – a routine – so your body learns all the signals that it’s time to switch off.” Put away your phone or tablet a few hours before bed, move from bright ceiling lights to softer yellow lamp light and remove electronics with red standby lights from your bedroom.
“During the first hour of sleep all that light is like a laser into your pineal gland so you don’t create the right balance between sleep hormones and wake hormones and you spend most of the night in a light sleep state.”
Reading a book, taking a warm bath or using a meditation app will also help condition your mind for sleep. And, contrary to misconceptions, one of the most natural triggers for sleep is a cooler bedroom and a cooler bed. Littlehales recommends setting a bedroom temperature of 16-18C and using a lightweight microfibre duvet, rather than a heavy one stuffed with natural filling, because they adapt better to temperature fluctuations to help you maintain a steady body temperature during the night.
Armed with your own tailor-made presleep routine, you’ll feel refreshed and race-ready by the time you tuck into your morning porridge.
QUALITY SLEEP CAN BRING MORE CONSISTENT PERFORMANCES AND FASTER RECOVERY TIMES