Wake up to why sleep matters for athletes
Experts say sleep is as important as training hard and eating well.
Most athletes know the
importance of focused training. They’re not likely to down lots of junk food, either. Too often, though, they don’t worry enough about sleep.
And quality and amount of sleep, it turns out, can make a difference in athletic performance.
Researchers have long known that sleep deprivation can cause everything from irritability and cognitive impairment to slower reaction times
and an impaired immune system. But studies now show
that getting extended sleep can help swimmers dive offff the starting blocks more quickly, tennis players hit balls more accurately, basketball players make the hoop more often and football players run faster.
Those studies of elite collegiate athletes by sleep researcher Cheri Mah at the University of California-San Francisco’s Human
Performance Center, should serve as a reminder to recreational athletes that getting enough sleep is a crucial part of race readiness.
“The underlying message is sleep is foundational and should be considered a priority along with other aspects of a training program,” Mah said by phone from California last week.
According to the latest recommendations, released this year, healthy adults need at least seven hours of sleep to prevent health risks, Mah said. Many of us don’t get that. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 30 percent of adults reported an average of less than six hours of sleep per day.
That’s a bad thing, especially for athletes, because recovery happens during the restorative phase of sleep, which usually occurs early in the night. That’s when the body releases human growth hormone, which helps rebuild muscle broken down during exercise.
“Many athletes are chronically sleep deprived, and many don’t get what they need,” Mah says. “Over time, that can build up as a sleep debt, and we’re starting to recognize that with reducing that debt there may be performance advantages.”
The good news? You can pay back sleep debt. The bad news? Studies suggest that it might take more than a single night or weekend to do that. Mah is still trying to understand exactly how long it might take, but said it depends on everything from how much sleep you’ve been getting to the quality of that sleep.
“It’s not as easy as do it for one week and it’s fully eliminated,” she says. “But if you build up a sleep debt, you can pay it back, even a little bit at a time.”
At Intelligent Sleep on Burnet Road in Austin, owner Bruce Wayne Meleski, who has a doctorate degree in human biology from the University of Texas, works with clients to improve their sleep. He sells mattresses, but also offers treatments on what’s called a sound bed, where music with specially synchronized beats is transmitted through a table as well as a set of earphones, so you can feel it as well as hear it. It’s used to promote relaxation and recovery.
“Athletes need to recover from training,” Meleski says. “You train hard, you recover. If you don’t get restorative sleep, your next workout is not going to be as strong.”
Among the athletes Meleski has worked with is Ryan Hess, a former collegiate runner who now co-owns the Ready to Run store on Far West Boulevard. Hess says he needs eight or nine hours of sleep — sometimes more. He set a personal record in the 5-mile and half marathon distances when he was working with Meleski, although he’s not sure how much was due to the treatments and how much was the placebo effect. Regardless, he knows solid sleep is key to a good performance.
“I tell people all the time, training is only a third of it,” Hess says. “The other is nutrition and sleep habits. If you’re not doing all three and mastering them, you’re not going to get the best out of yourself and it’s going to show on race day.”
Lying on the sound bed feels a bit like listening to soothing music while lounging on the hood of a pickup truck with the engine running, but it does help distract from the usual “monkey mind” jumble of thoughts that swirl around some people. Meleski says this type of relaxation training on an athlete’s rest day can take away anxiety and edginess, which can translate into an advantage at the starting line.
Meleski can also send clients home with a kit to see how they sleep at night. (I tried this, dutifully sticking a pair of electrodes to my chest before hitting the hay. When Meleski crunched the data, he found that I’m not getting enough restorative sleep, which surprised me.)
He offers some basic tips for sleeping better, many of which revolve around unplugging from electronic devices, dimming the lights and slowing things down. Mah, the California sleep researcher, also notes that if you need more sleep, it’s easier to back up your bedtime than it is to sleep later.
Slow breathing and meditation can help. So can “sleep phones,” soft headbands with built in speakers that can be worn in bed. You can even get special music that uses what’s called binaural beats synced to frequencies to train the brain to go from hyper to calming mode.
It just might pay off at the next race.